Topics in Subtropics

Last Sunday was forecast as 20% chance of rain in Ventura, but it didn't happen. Today, Friday it was supposed to rain, but it's barely a drizzle. My car's dust has just been redistributed. Could a better prediction be forecast? According to Cliff Mass it certainly could. http://cliffmass.blogspot.

Thanks for the rains that leach the soils of accumulated salts and bring on new fresh growth. Or maybe not. When we apply irrigation water with salts which with few exceptions we do in irrigated agriculture, salts accumulate in the soil.

Ed Stover and crew at USDA, Fort Pierce in Florida have been studying the response of different scions and rootstocks that have been inoculated with the HLB bacteria. As reported in the Proceedings of the International Citrus Conference (http://www.icc2016.

The International Citrus Conference was just held and about 1,500 people came from all over the world to share their experiences and research in citrus. It included marketers, growers, government officials and researchers who all had citrus as their interest.

What this means is that there is different feeding behavior on different scion varieties that is unaffected by the rootstocks used in this study. This does not mean "a" rootstock can not have an effect, just that the ones used in this trial did not.