After the driest April we’ve seen in years in the county, May more than made up for it with close to seventeen inches of rain at the Jay station. June started off hot and dry, but the rain came back this past week, and more is in the forecast for next week. Most of our crop is in the ground now. Let’s look a little further down the road, because that same wet weather that finally let us plant also sets the stage for disease later in the season.

Peanut

The wet pattern is a mixed bag for peanut, and the diseases sort out differently depending on how each one responds to moisture.

The one place the rain helps is Aspergillus crown rot. That is a hot, dry-soil disease that thins stands early and, by doing so, can raise tomato spotted wilt pressure. Our dusty April was the kind of weather that favors it. The May rain cooled the soil and took some of that pressure off, so peanuts going in now face less crown rot risk than the ones planted into dry ground earlier.

The bigger story plays out later in the season, and it is about white mold and leaf spot. These are not seedling problems, they build in the canopy through the summer, and a young stand is not going to show them now. But the weather pattern we are starting with tells us something about the summer we may be heading into. Hot, dry stretches build white mold quietly, and then wet weather is what lets it break loose and gets leaf spot and rust moving fast. We have already had the dry, and now we have the moisture, with our hottest months still ahead. None of that is a problem today, but it is a fair early warning to plan a disease program for a year that could favor these diseases rather than one that holds them back. The UF/IFAS 2025 End-of-Season Florida Peanut Disease Notes, by Dr. Nick Dufault and colleagues, made the underlying point: mild conditions followed by wet periods create ideal conditions for late leaf spot and rust to build rapidly.

So a couple of things to keep in mind. First, on any peanuts still going in, do not mud them in. Saturated soil and deep planting give soilborne fungi time to rot seed before it ever emerges, and peanut seed is too expensive to gamble. The ground had dried out a good bit, but with the rain coming back, it is still worth waiting on any low, wet spots until they are fit.

Second, plan your leaf spot and white mold program for a wet year now, before the season gets away from you. The clearest lesson out of 2025 was that growers who held a consistent schedule, roughly every 14 days or tighter, did better than those who stretched their intervals or leaned on a single chemistry early. Shorten the interval when the forecast turns favorable for disease and disease is already present. Rotating fungicide groups matters too, since strobilurin (Group 11) resistance in leaf spot is documented in Florida.

Cotton

For cotton, the wet weather matters most right at the start, at the seedling stage.

Cool, wet soil is exactly what Pythium and Rhizoctonia need. When seed sits in saturated ground and is slow to come up, those fungi have time to work, and the result is rotted seed and damped-off seedlings. Seedling disease is one of the most consistent yield robbers in Southeast cotton even in a normal year, and a wet planting window only adds to it.

The practical response is patience, and the good news is the ground has come around. After that cool, wet stretch in May, soil temperatures at Jay are back into the upper 70s and 80s, so cotton going in late now is hitting warm ground instead of cold mud. The real work at this point is on the fields that went in during the wet window. Walk those, count your plants, and make any replant call before the calendar closes the door, because a late first planting uses up the room you would otherwise have to come back if a stand fails.

Further out, target spot and areolate mildew are the foliar diseases to watch, and like the peanut leaf diseases they favor a wet canopy. They are not a concern on young cotton, but the time to think about them is as the rows lap and bloom begins, that is the window when scouting and a timely spray protect yield.

The takeaway

It is the same weather telling two different stories. In peanut, the rain eased crown rot but set up white mold and leaf spot for the months ahead, so the move is patience at planting and a fungicide program planned for a wet year. In cotton, the risk came up front during the wet window, so the move now is checking stands carefully before making any replant calls.

The thread through both is that dry weather was holding disease back and wet weather lets it loose. The growers who come out ahead are usually the ones who planned for it: rotation, variety, and a fungicide program that can tighten up when the weather turns rather than reacting once disease is established.

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