Brown rot of stone fruit: cause, symptoms and control
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.
Crops
Peach (19)
Diseases (6)
Peach fruit deformation disease: the Greek chronicle and the Chinese evidence
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.
Wood-decay fungi on peach: Phellinus is an indicator, not a killer
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.
Bacterial canker of stone fruit, Pseudomonas syringae
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.
European Stone Fruit Yellows: the phytoplasma of stone fruit
What phytoplasmas are, the ten symptoms they cause, and why 'Candidatus Phytoplasma prunorum' cannot be cured — only kept out with clean planting material.
Xylella fastidiosa, a bacterium that threatens tree fruit growing as a whole
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.
Pests (2)
The brown marmorated stink bug, BMSB, Halyomorpha halys
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.
Capnodis tenebrionis, the flat-headed root borer of stone fruit
It lays only in dry soil, its eggs do not hatch in moist soil, and its larvae drown in the gum of vigorous trees. Why irrigation is the principal control method, not just good practice.