The vine takes up more calcium than any other element, yet only 8 kg per hectare leave with the fruit, and 80% of it enters within fifty days of fruit set. How many kilograms of each element are actually removed, why excess nitrogen halves storage firmness, and what a 2025 trial failed to confirm.
Leonardite is oxidised lignite with up to 85% humic acids, but pH below 3, up to 6% sulphur and almost no phosphorus. What the analyses and meta-analyses show, where it delivers and where it does not, and what Regulation (EU) 2019/1009 and the organic farming rules require.
No synthetic active substance is authorised against it on fig or persimmon in Greece - only paraffin oils, maltodextrin and potassium salts of fatty acids, all of which act physically. That makes the crawler stage the whole of the treatment window, and coverage more important than dose.
Rojo Brillante is harvested firm and intensely astringent. Astringency goes only when enough acetaldehyde accumulates to make the tannins insoluble. The mechanism, the CO2 and ethanol protocols as applied in Spain, and what goes wrong when the chamber leaks, the batch is uneven or the treatment runs too long.
The almond removes 76 kg of potassium and only 8 kg of phosphorus per tonne of kernel. Why the winter compound gets all three elements wrong, and how to calculate the real requirement from yield.
What happens inside the fruit from bloom to the cold store, why the 6.2 Brix threshold was transferred uncritically from New Zealand, and the trial showing that early harvest costs storage life.
The seven categories, the molecular mechanisms, the EU legal framework since 2022, and the six questions to ask a supplier before buying.
Calcium has the widest gap between what growers think they are doing and what actually happens. 83% of the fruit's calcium enters in the first four weeks; at 60 days the door closes; the pedicel holds 3 to 10 times more than the fruit; and blossom end rot is not primarily a calcium deficiency at all.
Three hours of wetness at 24 C infect the blossom. Latent infections decide the harvest months in advance, and 156 products are only 26 active substances.
The most serious disease of the crop worldwide, and it cannot be cured. Pruning cuts stay susceptible for at least 64 days, not a few. Summer leaf spots predict winter cankers. And all 22 strains tested from Pella in northern Greece proved resistant to copper.
Symptomatic plants in 96% of Italian orchards, and no correlation with soil or grower practice. Prevention at the pruning cut is the only tool there is.
Which species actually matter, how to tell nematode damage from vine decline, and why soil temperature decides whether the nematicide works, with the Greek register and 31 sources.
Bactrocera oleae does not take kilos, it takes the grade: between 10% and 15% infestation the acidity crosses 0.8 and the oil is downgraded from extra virgin. Biology, the Candidatus Erwinia dacicola symbiont, the degree-day model, fruit sampling and the 5% and 2% thresholds, bait sprays, kaolin, mass trapping, and the resistance now measured in Greek populations.
Vigour, precocity, yield efficiency, soil adaptation and disease tolerance of the cherry rootstocks, from fourteen sources, and why the same rootstock is a different tree in another field.
Infiltration, drainage, the profile and the water table are four different questions with four different answers. The FAO ring test, the pit test, the observation pipe and how to read the colours of a soil pit - plus why an 8 L/h dripper ponds on clay.
Whole young apricot orchards in Romagna dried up within a few years. The cause was not a new pathogen but the change in the cultivar base: the early, vigorous cultivars planted from the late 1990s proved barely tolerant of Pseudomonas syringae, and the same plant material is going into Greek ground. The susceptibility list, copper rates with the 28-kilo ceiling, and what was tried as an alternative.
Three calculations made every day by eye, and for that reason wrong. How many kilograms of fertiliser a nutrient target needs, what was really applied over the season, and how much manure it takes to lift the organic matter of the soil.
An exotic quarantine insect spreading through Greece since 2016. Spraying does not control it and makes matters worse. How it arrived, how it is recognised, the generations, the hosts beyond citrus, the legal obligations that come with quarantine status, and the biological control developments of the past two years that have not yet reached the grower.
Five years of deformed peach fruit in Pella, the official analyses that ruled out a virus, and fifty years of Chinese research on the same phenomenon, published only in Chinese until now.
pH below 7.3, two metres free of an impermeable layer, five hours before the root runs out of oxygen in saturated soil. Why kiwifruit does better on loam than on sandy loam, what water quality rules out a block outright, and what it really costs to make a marginal block work.
90% of the nitrogen in next spring’s spur leaves comes from reserves stored this autumn, and the pistil forms 7 to 9 weeks after harvest. Autumn urea, boron and zinc - what the trials show, when they work, and the Polish study where only boron did anything at all.
A disease of rainy springs that neither kills the tree nor rots the fruit, it only downgrades it, and it does so shortly before harvest. Why it appears while the orchard is being sprayed, for four separate reasons, where the problem hides on shoots and leaves, the susceptibility window with its hidden incubation, and what is documented about the products and what is not.
Persimmon bears on shoots of the current season, and the whole method follows from that. Anatomy of the canopy, the target shape with its three production zones, the work year by year from planting to full production, old and neglected trees, and summer pruning in detail.
