- Author: Elizabeth E Grafton-Cardwell
It is important to do everything we can to avoid spreading Asian citrus psyllid around California, both because we don't want help it expand its range and we never know which psyllids are carrying huanglongbing disease (HLB). Psyllids tend to live on leaves and stems of citrus. Lindcove has just purchased field cleaning equipment for the Center. Monday we cleaned 40 bins of lemons to ship from our location inside the ACP quarantine to a packinghouse outside the quarantine. See Youtube video of fruit cleaning equipment to see how it functions. It took four people to run the equipment and field clean the fruit, averaging about 4 minutes per bin. But this allowed us to avoid spraying with pesticides prior to fruit movement. It is pretty amazing how many leaves were mixed in with fruit. The equipment is on a trailer that can be hauled to research locations outside of Lindcove. In this way, we can clean fruit before bringing it to the Lindcove packline and ensure that we are not bringing psyllids to the research center.