Dead annual shoots with the leaves still attached, buds that fail to break, and since 2021 an epidemic on the plain of Giannitsa. The cause is the fungus Diaporthe amygdali. In detail: the distinction from the blind shoot, the fusicoccin that kills the shoot, the entry points at leaf fall, the susceptibility of ten clingstone cultivars and the year’s programme.
Brown rot, leaf curl, shot hole, scab, rust, bacterial spot and canker, Armillaria, Phytophthora, Diaporthe amygdali, plum pox, and the pests: peach twig borer, oriental fruit moth and summer fruit tortrix with degree-days from orchards in Pella, spider mites, Comstock mealybug, flat-headed root borer, goat moth. A tool that compares field symptoms against the profiles of 33 causes, with photographs and the one feature that separates them.
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.
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.
On stone fruit the species is Phellinus tuberculosus, not P. igniarius. It lives inside your own orchard, enters through pruning wounds and works for years before the bracket appears.
Phytophthora, or crown rot, is a serious problem for agriculture worldwide, because beyond the crop it destroys the planting itself, which in tree fruit takes years to build again.
An endophyte, not an invader: it enters early and waits for stress. Why water stress two to six months after infection is what decides the damage, why the water-only control matched every fungicide in the 2008 trial, and what actually works, pruning, post-harvest irrigation and cultivar choice.
The bacterium that manufactures the frost wounds it then invades through. The knife test that separates infectious from non-infectious gummosis, the nematode complex, why copper hydroxide works and copper oxide does not, and the entry point most often missed in young trees.
The bacterium that destroyed the olive groves of the Salento: how the biofilm kills the tree by thirst, why the nymph of the vector is the only accessible target, why there is no cure, and the two resistant olive cultivars that are now the one hopeful development.
The larva eats the inside of the trunk for two or three years, and the tree fades with stunting, chlorosis and small leaves, the same picture as Phytophthora, Armillaria or a nutrient deficiency. Identification of adult, larva and egg, the multi-year cycle, why it returns to the same trees, the distinction from the leopard moth, and what pheromone traps are actually good for.
Two overlapping generations a year, 538 degree-days from egg to adult, and a chemical toolbox that keeps shrinking. Greek monitoring data from Imathia and Pieria, the native egg parasitoids already at work, and where the samurai wasp stands today.
It attacks half-ripe and ripe fruit, which is then lost. In northern Greece it does not strike with the same intensity every year, and the reason lies in how it overwinters. Host range, the life cycle, the number of generations, monitoring with traps and what the traps can and cannot tell, dispersal distance, and the three control tools.
The flat-headed root borer kills apparently healthy trees, with the damage done below ground. Biology, a degree-day model for timing the intervention, why drip irrigation needs adjusting, and what the experimental data show: control of the adults comes from combinations of modes of action and application, not from a single active substance.
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.
