Good Plant News

Richard Ha writes:

I wrote about how we’ve run into some trouble in the plant houses, but today Dr. Scot Nelson told us it’s not a serious problem. 

Three of the samples he took tested negative for virus and only one tested positive. He showed me how the positive sample showed dead tissue over the vein of the leaves. The ones that tested negative did not have that feature.

We went into the field to see how many plants are exhibiting that symptom, and it was very few  –  maybe less than one percent. Furthermore, Dr. Nelson told us the virus was more likely to have spread by aphids than by mechanical transmission.

This is huge – less than one percent of our plants affected, and the problem not spread by tools or by touch.

Tomorrow is our visit from Pete Bunn, who is an independent consultant on plant nutrition. I wonder what he will say about the thousands of plant we thought were virus-infected. We have our suspicions, as well as a tentative plan of action, but we’ll wait to hear Pete’s conclusions.

It's a reminder that farming is more involved than we sometimes think.

Comments

[damon]

That is a relief.

I guess you could always make smoothies out of the fruits that may turn out less then visually perfect.

Glad to hear you don't have to start back from ground zero!

[Richard Ha]

Aloha Damon:
Thousands of plants still show weird symptoms---Dr. Scot Nelson says the we still need to be cautious because we have not determined whether or not the virus needs a certain treshhold to be detectable. so, we are now testing all parts of the plants. We are not out of the woods yet.
Thanks for your concern.