- Author: Mark Battany
Few people today are aware of the history of the UC Agricultural Experiment Station at Paso Robles over a century ago. The information that it produced regarding the potential of dry farmed fruit crops in the area has renewed relevance today as the limits of groundwater supplies are approached in many parts of the Central Coast.
The passage of the Hatch Act by Congress in 1887 provided funding to establish and operate agricultural experiment stations. Later that same year, three new experiment stations were created in California, located in the Sierra Foothills, the San Joaquin Valley, and the South Coast Range in Paso Robles. A fourth followed later at Pomona. These were operated as sub-stations to the main experiment...
- Author: Mark Battany
Most vineyards in this area will show increasing infections of wood-rotting fungal pathogens as they become older. Both the Eutypa and Bot Canker pathogens are found in local vineyards, and vineyards often have mixed infections. Numerous vineyards begin to show symptoms of infections by the time that they are ten years old, indicating that the infections began quite early during the life of the vineyard; making efforts to prevent these infections from happening in the first place needs to be the foundation of any management program.
Exterior symptoms of canker infections generally include dead spurs or cordons; if a cut is made through a symptomatic cordon or trunk, a dark wedge of infected wood is usually visible. Infections...
- Author: Mark Battany
In the past several years a number of coastal vineyards have experienced significant levels of vine death due to Black Foot Disease (aka Young Vine Decline). This disease results from infections with Cylindrocarpon spp. and Campylocarpon spp. fungal pathogens. In typical cases, vines appear to make normal growth for a couple of seasons and then cease growth rather suddenly, often times by not pushing any buds in the spring or by having very stunted shoots that soon die back.
Vineyards that have been suffering the largest losses locally in the past several years have been sites planted on ground that was recently farmed with intensive row crops (vegetables, flowers, etc.), and which were planted with 101-14 rootstock. The...
- Author: Mark Battany
An unusual malady called "Pinot Leaf Curl" has been appearing in Central Coast vineyards this spring, affecting plantings of Pinot Noir primarily but with symptoms sometimes also seen in other Pinot varieties. This malady appears inconsistently from one year to the next, but when it does appear it is generally very widespread, suggesting a correlation to environmental conditions. Symptoms on the Central Coast are generally not as severe as are often observed in the North Coast.
The symptoms are often mistaken for other causes such as shoot botrytis, frost damage, or spray oil damage. Images of these other symptoms are shown below.
For more detailed information on Pinot Leaf Curl, see the article by Rhonda Smith,...
- Author: Mark Battany
The 'Red Bug' (Scantius aegyptius) has recently become more visible in some vineyards in Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo County. This bug was first documented in the USA in 2009, being found in Orange County in Southern California; since that time it has been observed over an increasingly wider range. For detailed close-up images see the UC Riverside Center For Invasive Species Research website:
http://cisr.ucr.edu/red_bug.html
The bugs can congregate in very large numbers under the loose bark of grape vines, with their presence being very obvious due to their distinctive bright red coloring. This may lead growers to suspect that...
