Rot from frost damage to hostas

[LiquidFeet]

I must have 400 hostas in my garden.
Here in New England had a very early spring, followed by some very cold nights.
My hostas are rising, but some have suffered greatly.

I am now noticing that some pips are gooey, as in ROTTING. I am concerned.
Will the healthy leaves be vulnerable to this rot?
How about the crowns? I do NOT want rampant crown rot in my garden.
But there are too many hostas all over the place for me to crawl on hands and knees and test every pip for gooeyness and cut them out.
Is this what I have to do?

HELP!

[Chris_W]

You don't need to worry. This rot isn't something that will be affecting the plant underneath it, just those particular eyes, and I've never seen a frosted eye lead to any permanent damage to a plant.

What will happen now is that those hostas will force new eyes to develop from around the rotten one so you will often end up with more eyes this summer than anticipated but they will be smaller than the old. When I see hostas with tons of smaller eyes then I know it may have had some kind of damage like this in the past, but it isn't anything to worry about at all.

The only time I need to intervene is when the eye wasn't completely turned to mush and only the outer layers were frozen, causing the hosta to have trouble unfurling. You will know if that is they case because the eye in question will keep elongating and swelling but the tip will stay pinched. Then I go and help it by pinching off the part that is caught up.

So there is nothing to worry about. Give them some time and new eyes will develop this spring.

[LiquidFeet]

Oh, I see Chris you have answered. I don't get notified in my email about replies; I'll see if that's an option in this forum.
Since this all started to happen, I've checked out the plants every few days. The gooey rotten parts simply dried out and I stopped worrying.

Then I noticed an entire wave of lancifolia rotting. I freaked out again, brushed away the rotten leaves, and gave up on removing the rotted parts going down into the ground. I've been watching them and waiting to see if they dry out and keep growing. They seem to be doing that. I'm so glad this isn't crown rot. I do think that back when I had it, I read that crown rot happens in hot weather. It's not hot yet here in New England. So whatever fungus/bacteria is eating the damaged leaves and crowns/eyes that they are attached to, I think it stops on its own when it has used up the damaged plant material.

[LiquidFeet]

Follow-up:
The frost-bitten,rotted hostas have survived, but in an altered state.

They shrank; I suspect the roots shriveled up when the leaves got gooey and dropped off.
The leaves that survived got attacked by brown spot. I waited and watched, and chose not to spray.
More leaves fell off from the brown spot, but enough survived to keep the plants alive.

Most of the affected hostas were lancifolia, a very hearty cultivar, so I suspected they would survive.
They are sending out their second flush now, and there are no brown spots on those leaves.
I'll have to wait until the end of the summer to see if they have enough extra energy to bloom.
Their shrunken size has created a large thin area on my hosta hill, but I think all is going to be fine by next year.

[LiquidFeet]

This year's follow-up:

The affected plants recovered, slowly, last season. The group that was damaged the most is a large wave of Lancifolia (13 large, mature clumps). I have several waves of lancifolia on the hill behind my house, along with several hundred other hostas and companion plants. This year that damaged wave is still smaller than the other waves but not as pathetic as it was for most of last year. So the regrowth/recovery did not catch back up to normal in one season, even with these fast growers.

There is something else going on in this garden that started with that difficult spring last year. I've got to get serious and dig stuff up to see the roots and figure out just what's going on. Some kind of fungus (I think) is attacking other hostas in random spots across this large garden. It started last year with that nasty spring freeze, then seemed to slow down during the heat of midsummer. So I thought it was related to the freeze.

But it is beginning to be evident again right now as plants emerge. Darn.