I’ve got some verbena in both the back garden and in a pot on the front of the house.
The verbena in back doesn’t seem to be doing very well - it’s flowering and spreading, but the arms near the center of the plant are turning white and ugly. The times I’ve seen that before, it was because I had planted verbena in an area that wasn’t getting any sun.
The thing is, I’ve seen slime near the bad areas. It’s not like a slug trail, it’s more like someone stood over the thing and blow their nose. Alot.
Some of this verbena was transplanted to a pot in the front (before I noticed the slime, so I’m not sure if it was done before the slime showed up - but I think it was clean when I did this) and, lo and behold, slime up there, too.
It’s pretty unlikely that some beast is moving between the fenced back yard and the front yard. These things are part of a butterfly garden, so I can’t be too indescriminate with any insecticides I put out.
I’ve never seen this before, but this stuff seems to be killing my verbena - which is odd, because so far I’ve found verbena pretty much impossible to kill unless I put some effort into it.
Where are you raising this slime, has it been raining a lot, does your soil drain properly, and do people run screaming from your house when the slime oozes through the ventilator slots?
If it looks like this, like firm white snot with a few black tiny dots in it, it could be something that in Dutch is called “sterrenschot”. (“star -shot”). That’s a homemade translation, I wouldn’t know what the official English term is. Anyway, “sterrenschot” is when a bird of prey eats a female frog with a belly full of frog-spawn. The bird can’t digest the slimey pre-spawn, so he regurgitates (sp?) the stuff. Looks icky, but it soon rots away. Sterrenschot doesn’t harm plants in anyway, so the damage to your verbena’s should be caused by something else.
I just mentioned the stuff for completeness, but based on your description I think a slime mould, as **Spectre of Pithecanthropus ** mentioned, is quite likely. There are many different looking kinds and one kind is dure to look like, well, snot.
