Strawberries and Caneberries

I had a pretty sharp eyed PCA stop by my office just this morning with a sizable sample of what turned out to be Lewis mite from a newly planted field of strawberries.

It's been a long wait for many I know, but the revised UC IPM Guidelines for strawberry are now available. This is a massive job involving a lot of work from many people, but these are the peer reviewed gold standard for pest management and cultural practices in strawberry: https://www2.ipm.ucanr.

Part of my work has come to include substrate production of caneberries. Some of these are easy since they are pest management issues which don't vary that much from field problems, but others, like the nutritional situation depicted below, are far more complex.

We finally have a label for the insecticide Sequoia.

Introduction: The difficulty of controlling Macrophomina, the causal agent in charcoal rot in strawberry, in California has brought about a renewed interest in non-conventional methods for its management.