Growers can now use a simple freezing technique to determine if they have latent brown rot infections in their orchards. The University of California’s Dr. Themis Michailides, who helped develop the Overnight Freezing Incubation Technique, said that growers can perform the test by collecting a representative sample of immature fruit from the orchard and surface sterilizing them in a chlorine solution for 20 minutes. The fruit is then washed with sterile distilled water, placed on a sterilized plastic screen in a container with water at the bottom, and frozen for ten hours. The container of fruit is then placed at […]