Nice gallery of lygus (plant bug) management in cotton in the American Southeast.

Run through it if you have a few minutes, again this is in cotton, but the points about lygus management are not unrelated to our situation in the berry business. 

http://southeastfarmpress.com/cotton/gallery-black-flag-cotton-and-preventing-plant-bug-injury-squaring#slide-0-field_images-114341

Key points:

1. Lygus (plant bugs as they call them over there) move from their preferred hosts (see below) to cotton when it gets dry.

2. No need to over-react and spray all of your crop when you see the problem in one area.  Use a sweep net and understand the lygus population over the entire field, field edges might have more.

3. Recommended to open lygus control campaign with highest rate of a neonicotinoid insecticide; not sure personally about that one, don't forget that neonicotinoids are just as heavy, if not heavier, on many of our beneficial insects (Geocoris, Orius and Nabis) since they are in the same insect family as lygus.

3. Destruction of cotton terminals takes place in a short period of time (20 minutes); would this point to even less time to negatively affect the achenes of strawberry and developing drupelets of blackberry?

4. High numbers of lygus are reported in corn and wheat surrounding cotton, but yet the authors do not claim to know why the lygus is coming into cotton.  Interesting that high numbers in a surrounding crop do not necessarily mean lygus migrates to another crop.  We do not know from where our lygus is coming.

5. Monitor the situation after the spray. Did you achieve good knockdown?

Nice little article. 

For those of you interested in farming organically and curious about the business of it, this seminar, to be held June 22 at the UC Cooperative Extension office in Salinas and attached below, should be of interest.

A brief FYI for those of you who have seen this bug in your strawberries.   It's not uncommon this year.

This is a Say stink bug, Chlorochroa sayi and can cause deformation depending on the stage of the fruit.    Note the orange stripe around the outer edge of the body. The triangular area in the back has four yellow spots. This species is a pest in tomatoes, but this year there are high numbers of them in vegetable fields.  

Rather than re-writing what is already written on this pest in the UC IPM guidelines, we provide this link from tomatoes:

http://www.ipm.ucdavis.edu/PMG/r783300211.html

Growers, field managers, PCAs, and other personnel overseeing strawberry on California's Central Coast occasionally encounter strange and bizarre deformities of strawberry fruit and flowers. Such a condition is called “phyllody” and occurs when leaves or leaf-like structures replace the flower and flower parts of strawberry. This condition can also result in the flower parts turning green. Phyllody can occur in two different ways.

1. Non-infectious phyllody: The type of phyllody currently developing in spring 2015 is apparently the non-infectious type. Non-infectious phyllody seems to be associated with an excess of supplemental chilling of the transplants while in storage. Our experience in the field is that these symptoms, alarming as they are, will go away after showing up in a spring flush of fruit. Therefore the condition is not persistent. Figure 1 shows a spectacular example of this disorder.

2. Infectious phyllody: This category of phyllody occurs due to infection by a phytoplasma. Phytoplasmas are bacteria-like organisms that are pathogenic to plants and are vectored by leafhoppers. Leafhoppers carry the phytoplasmas in their bodies and inject them while feeding on plants. Two diseases that cause phyllody are aster yellows and green petal. Strawberry plants infected with phytoplasmas often continue to bear deformed fruit as seen in Figures 2, 3, 4 and 5.