February 15, 2019

This category can only be viewed by members.

Disease Management

Featured stories covering disease management in this issue.

Click here to view a PDF version of this issue.

Photos courtesy Sara Villani/NCSU Bitter rot is broken down into two main types in the Eastern United States. The type shown here in a Rome Beauty is more common in the Northeast and Midwest. Typical features include sunken lesions that are marked with small pimple-like structures (acervuli) that are filled with salmon- to orange-colored spores. (Courtesy Sara Villani/NCSU)

Bitter rot spotting in Northeast and Midwest

Ralph and Cheryl Broetje (Courtesy Broetje Orchards)

Sale of Broetje Orchards creates FirstFruits Farms

Lav Khot, a biological systems professor at Washington State University, leads a tour at the university’s Center for Precision and Automated Agriculture Systems in Prosser, Washington, in 2017. Khot and a team of collaborators have received a $300,000 New Innovator grant from the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research to explore ways to reduce pesticide residues. (Ross Courtney/Good Fruit Grower)

New Innovator grant targets pesticide residue

An example of San Jose scale (Diaspidiotus perniciosus). (Courtesy USDA Agricultural Research Service)

San Jose scale scuffle in Michigan

Workers cut away fireblight infections in pear orchards on Friday, June 15, 2018, near Monitor and Cashmere in the Wenatchee Valley, Washington. Nearly everyone in the pear industry in the Wenatchee Valley, even workers who have been here 34 years, is calling 2018 the worst fireblight season they have seen. (Ross Courtney/Good Fruit Grower)

Managing fire blight for the conventional grower

Michigan State University Extension tree fruit educator David Jones, right, leads a grower class in 2017. After fire blight became an issue in many Michigan apple orchards in 2018, Jones and a statewide team began searching for the cause of the outbreak. Jones focused on West Central Michigan and whether streptomycin resistance may have played a role. (Courtesy David Jones/MSU Extension)

Midwest faces strep-resistant fire blight

Stopping shoot blight

Organic control options for fire blight

It’s been several years since seemingly healthy young trees began to rapidly decline from a not-yet-understood disorder known as rapid apple decline, including in this research block at Penn State University’s Fruit Research and Extension Center in Biglerville, Pennsylvania. PSU pathologist Kari Peter, who first described the disorder, says work is moving forward to determine if a newly discovered virus is the culprit, or at least part of the problem. (Kate Prengaman/Good Fruit Grower)

Viral link examined in rapid apple decline

Symptoms of little cherry disease and Western X disease as found in The Dalles, Oregon, in July 2018. (Photo illustration by TJ Mullinax/Good Fruit Grower)

Little cherry disease creates a big problem

Scott Harper of the Clean Plant Center Northwest is asking stone fruit growers to be on the lookout for peach trees with premature yellowing, reddening and curling of leaves and dieback, such as this peach tree in Franklin County, Washington, in 2018. The symptoms could indicate Western X phytoplasma or pear decline phytoplasma.(Courtesy Alice Wright/Washington State University)

Phytoplasmas found in stone fruit

Spray researchers aim to catch their drift – Video

Eddie Kasner, a researcher with the Pacific Northwest Agricultural Safety and Health Center at the University of Washington, drives the tractor during a drift trial conducted with WSU researchers in late fall 2018. Researchers will repeat the same procedure again this summer when the orchard has a full canopy. (TJ Mullinax/Good Fruit Grower)

Steering the research on spray drift

Roland Markgraf, a young grower from Kelowna, British Columbia

A patchwork of cover crops blankets a Sunnyside, Washington, vineyard floor during 2017 trials by Washington State University researcher Tarah Sullivan, exploring the connection between soil microbes and Concord grape vine chlorosis. (Courtesy Joan Davenport/Washington State University)

Digging into soil bacteria and chlorosis

Risk of crown gall disease, caused by a bacterium that hijacks the healing process after cold damage, appears to be reduced but not eliminated by planting certified vines. (Courtesy Michelle Moyer, Washington State University)

A galling problem for grape growers