Is your asparagus ailing? Can your melons be suffering a malady? Find out what's hurting your corn and cucurbits at Vegetable MD Online, vegetablemdonline.ppath.cornell.edu, a free service of the Cornell University plant pathology department.

"I've always had an interest in popularizing the good production work we do at Cornell," says Thomas A. Zitter, Cornell professor of plant pathology and the web site's creator. "It's been needed a long time," he says, noting that he is particularly proud of the site's vegetable disease photo gallery. "We have even better photos now that didn't appear in the original information sheets."

If you want to know about common blight in beans, a fact sheet describes its leaf symptoms and explains that it is caused by a bacterium. While warm, humid conditions favor the development of common blight, Vegetable MD Online says that even a trace of infected seed can infect an entire field.

Vegetable MD Online also was developed by Margaret McGrath, Cornell associate professor of plant pathology at the Long Island Horticulture Research and Extension Center, Riverhead, N.Y., and by Dawn Dailey-O'Brien, an extension support specialist in plant pathology.

Navigating the web site is easy. A click on "Diseases by Crops" finds the vegetable of interest displayed as seed packets, and the current fact sheets available, together with photos of diseased tissue that can be magnified online. Zitter says pictures will be updated regularly so that variations in disease appearance can be included.

"We're trying to make the web site as user friendly as possible for commercial growers and homeowners," he says, observing that many Cornell Cooperative Extension educators send him digital images of new diseases in the field for web publication.

Vegetable MD Online also links to integrated crop and pest management guidelines for commercial vegetable production.