Scaffolds 2024 Digest: Week 1
This post is a text digest of the Scaffolds Podcast. To listen to the original episode, visit the following link: Scaffolds Podcast on Spotify
Monique Rivera: Welcome to season two of Scaffolds. This is Monique Rivera, your host and assistant professor of entomology at Cornell AgriTech. Co-hosting with me is my pathology counterpart, Kerik Cox, who’s an associate professor of plant pathology. This year we will also be joined by Kelsey Tobin, a postdoctoral researcher in my lab, and occasionally also by Anna Wallis, our New York State Fruit IPM coordinator. We are back with a rebranding and excitement for a new season. This podcast is a weekly roundup of timely updates on insect and disease management, as well as phenological developments across New York state for apple growers. This season we will have some fun guests, so stay tuned. In this episode, we talk about what to expect and how to manage risk after a mild winter and warm temperatures in February and March. I talk about scouting and thresholds for European red mite and when to apply dormant oils. Kerik shares about how to select a biofix, reducing early season inoculum, and current apple scab risks. Anna tells us some exciting statewide scouting initiatives for this season. And lastly, Kelsey brings us current degree day and phenology around the state.
Entomology Updates with Dr. Monique Rivera
Okay, let’s get into it. I’ve got to admit I’m feeling a little rusty. It’s been a year since I’ve done this. Well, maybe not a year, but I have been absent from recording myself for a while. But I think I have a pretty good update for you guys.
So, it’s already been an interesting season weather wise. I think all of this early heat is really making a lot of people worried. The quicker the trees develop, the more scary it gets because there’s a chance for a freeze event during bloom. I think we’re escalating towards that as a potential thing with random snow events. Many are saying it has been a mild winter, and it has been a mild winter, but it also has been a dry winter. We’ve had a lot less snow than two years ago when I first moved to New York, but I also heard that the amount of snow two years ago was a bit of an anomaly. Of course, this weekend we had snow, but we also hit 60 degrees on Wednesday of this week. So basically, the weather is unpredictable, but we are far enough along that I think it’s important to note that this year has a potential to be a monster for insects. The more mild winter is likely to promote more overwintering success and the ability to get started sooner, with warmer temps occurring sooner than expected.
So, what do I think we should be thinking about this early in the season for insect management? And I want to return with a conversation about dormant oils. So, between bud break and half-inch green is really the best window to apply a dormant oil and, because these are contact materials, it’s best to wait for a sunny day with good weather to apply the oil to ensure maximum contact with any early moving insects. Stylet oil I think is the most commonly talked about oil in New York, and I was wondering when I got here why we talk about oils so differently here than they do on the West Coast. But I realized it’s because some of the West Coast oils are not labeled here. In particular, 415 oil, which is a much lighter oil and used in that fashion. But I did find that 440 oil is labeled here. This was actually on the Wilbur Ellis website and we don’t have Wilbur Ellis here, so I don’t know how available that will be. And I tried to look at Nutrien for comparable things, but was struggling to navigate their hard to navigate website.
When it comes to dormant oils, one of the major pests that we think about this time in the spring is European red mite. So, if you’re able to find European red mite eggs on the bark in this early season stage, or you have a history of annual infestation, it’s worth considering adding a miticide with an additional application of an early season oil at tight cluster. A sampling program for European red mite would be to
- look for eggs on three to ten trees per block;
- take ten spur samples over the three to ten trees. Spurs are these little tiny, one inch, maybe half of an inch in diameter. And you’ll be looking at the wood around those points for the eggs.
An infestation point that is a cause for concern, and when you should consider adding a miticide would be if 100% of those spur samples have 11-50 eggs each. 10% of spurs containing eggs would warrant a 0.5% of oil application at tight cluster.
So, let’s talk about oil percentages. Because it is typically risky, you do not want to apply an oil when it’s going to get above 90 degrees, which we’re not going to get in the spring. What we’re worried about is temperatures dipping below freezing. In that case, I think timing oils is difficult and I think that’s really discouraging for people considering this. But I think if any year was a year to get a dormant oil on, I think this would be the year with two mild and/or dry winters in a row. And like I said, I really think that the insects have the potential to be a monster this season. So, I leave you with that to consider. And feel free as always to email me with any questions. It’s Monique.Rivera@cornell.edu. And next up will be Kerik’s update.
Pathology Updates with Dr. Kerik Cox
All right, here’s the first pathology update for the 2024 New York apple season. What does the season look like this year with our wildly changing climate? Once again, it looks like we’ve had a mild winter with many days well over 50 degrees, little to no snow cover. What’s even more disturbing is we had several days in February and March where the temperatures often exceeded 60°F. Not only did we hit green tip around March 12th in the Hudson Valley and a little bit earlier in Long Island, we also got green tip in the Finger lakes in Western New York at nearly the same time. When I first started, green tip in the Finger Lakes in Western New York was about two to three weeks beyond the Hudson Valley and almost four weeks behind Long Island. With these exceptional warm winters and early springs, it seems like we’re almost beginning to break dormancy on a more similar schedule. I noticed this last year and a couple years prior where both Geneva and Burlington, Vermont were almost on the same sync. And now it seems like we’re closing in on syncing all up together with the entire state going at about the same time. Sadly, it might start becoming late March.
The season’s nearly upon us and we should be ready to take action against diseases like Apple scab and maybe some other things. Luckily, we just had a really fortunate week of extremely cold weather that pretty much shut down everything with maturities and ascospores. Up until this coming week, beginning probably around Monday or Tuesday on March 25, things will be warming up again and the apple scab and the other pathogens will be active and ready to go.
So, what was it like in 2023? We had a moderate level of rainfall from early April and June, but we easily had a handle on this, and I think it wasn’t too bad. Plenty of opportunities to get applications on. But what was really a little bit more disturbing was later in the summer, from either June, July, or August, depending on where you were in the state, we often got some heavier rains, closing in on an inch, about three quarters of an inch, and these might have led to problems if you had any early infections slipping through. By comparison, 2021 and 2022 were much drier and those seasons you often got less than seven inches of rainfall the entire period of the apple scab season and very little opportunities for infection. Apple scab was at an all-time low.
Speaking of all-time lows, just like with last year, we had these later season rains and these really seem to favor the apple blotch pathogen, also formerly known as Marssonina blotch, which is caused by Diplocarpon malai. Three different names for one organism [apple blotch, previously Marssonina blotch, caused by Diplocarpon malai]. If you want to keep it simple, just call it apple blotch. If you want to grow the organism, just call it Diplocarpon and forget the other name entirely. Now, this one starts a little bit later in the apple scab season, which might make it a little more apt to surviving in our bizarre wild climate, where we often get a lot of inconsistent dry periods, wet periods, instead of a consistent dry, wet weather like we used to in early April and early May as well. And this one starts later and can defoliate the trees in late August and early September, and it can be quite dramatic indeed. We’ve seen at a lot of the orchards that we have on AgriTech, we have a lot of different varieties in my program now thanks to collaborations with Susan Brown, and we can see there are differences in how these things defoliate. One of the things that we noticed is that, if orchards and these susceptible varieties, if they didn’t receive applications at the best time to address apple blotch, they often defoliated long before harvest. Yes, it gives them fantastic color on those particular varieties, but what it also does is it probably puts the trees at a disadvantage coming into winter and winterizing and maybe even opening them up for other infections as they become compromised, and they can’t prepare for overwintering properly with that. That’s our overview of the two seasons. Next, I’m going to talk about inoculum production in 2024 in a separate video.
Okay, let’s talk about inoculum reduction in 2024. We had some pretty heavy late season rains in 2023. And there could be high levels of apple scab or that new annoying pathogen apple blotch or marssonina blotch, if you’re referring to the old name. One of the things that we can do is reduce the overwintering or primary inoculum for both of these diseases. And it’s going to make for an easier season long disease management, particularly if we end up finally getting some rainfall from green tip to petal fall. Presently, all we have is snow around March 23, 24th. Or if you’re in Riverhead on Long Island, you probably got a lot of rain in that particular instance.
So what we do now is sort of, epidemiologically speaking, if you’re able to reduce the initial inoculum, you will delay the epidemic. And if there’s no or little early rain in the season, it could almost delay the epidemic to a point where it’ll be too hot and dry later in the season for the apple scab fungus or other fungi to get in and cause high levels of disease. And so that’s what we want to do. What it does is it sort of shifts the start of the epidemic slightly so that it’s a little bit more unfavorable, especially for apple scab, which can’t stand hot weather as we get later on in the season. And it’s going to make all of your applications easier and it may even allow for you to skip an application or use a lighter material if we hit a dry period. It’s hard to predict what’s going on and how things are going to work. So I always recommend suppressing that initial inoculum. And then later, if you want to skip something or use a lighter product, do that.
But let’s get this apple scab and hit it hard early on and make an easier management season for the entire block. What to do? So, in addition to apple scab, it’s not only just good for leaf litter, but if there are any fruit drops or cuttings or old prunings, this could also reduce the inoculum potential for other foliage diseases. So obviously, I mentioned apple blotch. And on the old fruit drops, not only will they attract rodents and other creatures into the orchard, but they also harbor bitter, black, and white rot as well. These diseases can also be on prunings left over in the orchard as they make their pruning bodies in the woods. So as soon as it’s possible to get a tractor in there, and maybe now with this cold weather, if it’s dry enough, you can do that, get in there, rake up as many fruits, shoots and leaves on the floor that could contain all this inoculum. If you already did this in the fall or with flail mowing or urea sprays, it won’t be necessary to repeat this spring.
A lot of research early on out of the University of New Hampshire, but some of the experts on apple scab demonstrated that, yeah, it could help, but there are a lot of diminishing returns for doing it in both the spring and the summer. It’s never going to hurt to do it twice, obviously, but you may not get the big benefit that you would just doing it one or the two times. How do you know which time to do it? It’s whenever you can get the tractor in the orchard. You want to give that opportunity for things to decay and remove that inoculum out of there. Even if you’re already in green tip or even moving into tight cluster, it’s still worthwhile to reduce this inoculum now because it’s just going to make things easier to manage the rest of the season.
So what are the best options? One, apply urea to the leaf litter or use a flail mower to shred the leaves. What they’re going to do is they’re going to help the decomposition of these materials. In the case of flail mowing, you should sort of sweep them into the middle of a canopy from underneath the herbicide strips into the middles. Then at that point you’ll have most of the stuff that’s underneath the tree, which has most of the disease, into the row middles. After that, you set the flail mower to scalp the sod, if you use urea instead, you apply 40 pounds of feed grade urea in 100 gallons of water to the herbicide strip. You can also apply dolomitic lime at about 2.5 tons to the acre instead of urea. Of the various options, I like urea the best. It’s the simplest approach, but make sure to flush those sprayer pumps afterward. Since urea is caustic and can erode a pump over time fairly easily, always take extra care to rinse them. And also, as I mentioned before, you’re not just getting apple scab and potentially apple blotch inoculum, all the bitter rot, black rot that’s on apples and old fruit and twigs will be reduced as well as that leaf, fruit, and twig litter decomposes and just gets moved out of the orchard.
So the second component of reducing inoculum is to use a delayed dormant application for apple scab and fire blight. And we’ve had some pretty heavy warm weather after petal fall in the last couple of years, and we’ve had some pretty devastating fire blight epidemics in New York. Now, 2023 wasn’t the worst, but 2022 was rough. Even though we had a colder bloom in 2023, some of the orchards with some late season shoot blight could have some cankers. Presently, we’ve had a nice bout of cool weather last week, and the overwintering cankers could still be dormant. But as we go into this week and it begins to warm up into the high 50s, maybe 60s, those fire blight cankers could start to ooze.
While we’re having this cold spell, take a peek and see if you have any cankers because there won’t be a lot of leaves on the tree, particularly in the eastern part of the state. It could be important to determine now whether or not things are oozing. I also want to let you know that cold weather will not kill fire blight or overwintering cankers. The bacteria will be inactive, but still viable even lower than freezing temperatures. It’s just going to go ahead and start up again if the tissues are alive and healthy.
So in order to beat this fire blight, and we’ll talk on how this works on for apple scab as well, you can put on this almost one to two delayed dormant applications at silver tip. Now, the apple scab pathogen is also believed to survive in some of the conidia in the buds. So this is kind of a one two punch. Delayed dormant means just right after bud break, you’ve sort of delayed the application till after dormant. In our case, the silver tip is a really good application using a high 15% metallic copper equivalent. While it may be hard to get in this week due to some wet fields, if you haven’t made it yet, you can still delay this even a little bit to green tip. It’s probably going to be fairly safe to still apply this at green tip because there’s not a lot of tissue out there. But if you do go later in the season with this, you might want to leave out the oil in these super late stages. At AgriTech, we often make a second high MCE copper at quarter inch green, almost half inch green with no consequences. That seems to be sort of standard practice here. That’s all for inoculum reduction. And I’ll go on to the next topic of picking a biofix.
All right, now that we know the season is off and on the way, it’s time to talk about how to best plan your management practices using disease forecasting. It’s going to be the best way to do it. It’s going to eliminate unnecessary applications of fungicides and it’s going to give you the most cost effective management that you can possibly get when planning your management practices. And so, the first step in this is always picking a biofix date. And the one I’ll often be talking about and using in many of my extension activities is the Cornell and New York State IPM and the Northeast Regional Climate center system, the NEWA system. And then what this system will do is it’s going to identify predicted ascospore release and potential infection events. And it’s just going to help improve the cost effectiveness of fungicide investments and help you avoid any times where they would be unnecessary. It’s a win for the consumer, the regulator, and the grower, and everyone. So let’s use it.
But when using this, the first step is to pick a biofix and this is the date at which to start the model. A lot of times biofixes can be based on the characteristics of the host or pathogen, or if they’re insects, on the insect’s biology. In our case, we’ll be looking at pathogen biology. Now, apple scab has been kind of frustrating for determining the biofix. The forecasting system NEWA is going to provide them by default. And if you’re using other systems, they’re also going to estimate them as well. You might see various estimations by the systems, regional extension specialists may talk about information regarding shooting towers and squash mounts, and then there’s a ton of different cultivars on the farm at all sorts of different stages of maturity.
Now, historically speaking, the most accurate in the old days was using shooting towers and squash mounts. These give you the highest level of accuracy, but they’re very specific to the farm in which they are collected. The other thing that’s really tricky about them is they’re incredibly labor intensive. And not only that, they require a high level of skill, experience doing these as well. The experience and the skill and the labor is just no longer available. Fortunately, many years ago, 20, maybe even 50 years ago, there’s been a considerable amount of peer reviewed research that has demonstrated that you can get a fairly reasonable approximation of ascospore maturity based on temperature accumulations, 50 degree days, about after 50% flower bud break on McIntosh. And this over time led to an ascospore maturity model, which was refined with many, many rounds of research as people debated the various merits of the scientific research and identified new factors and other things involved. And this would allow both growers and people to sort of guesstimate when this would be without the labor intensive and highly technical squash mounts and shooting towers.
Why was McIntosh chosen? At that time in the eastern United States, McIntosh was one of the most heavily planted varieties. And it was likely that the local populations of our apple scab pathogen had sort of adapted along with the crop and evolved to release their spores when McIntosh had green tissue. That’s why it’s often most challenging now to manage disease on McIntosh. They’re more susceptible because we’ve sort of evolved our pathogen to attack this variety; maybe in Europe, their populations, it may not seem as susceptible. So a lot of it, aside from resistance genes, is sort of gearing our populations to sort of go after these things.
One thing that is important to note when picking this date are looking at the estimation of 50% flower bud break. And it’s really only considered to capture the peak and tail ends of the ascospore maturity and release information. Despite intense scientific validation, researchers routinely find mature ascospores in shooting towers and squash mounts long before bud break. Back in 1990, Dr. Acimovic at Virginia Tech, working in the Hudson Valley, observed and captured ascospores mature one to three weeks before the McIntosh bud break. It’s also complicated because McIntosh isn’t our variety that we plant the most anymore. Have new populations begin to grow, mature and release in accordance to other varieties? Maybe in the future we should be looking at Gala bud break as the biofix.
So now that we know that, it’s possible that ascospores are present before green tip, we need a solution. The one I’d like to recommend is looking at the biofix or the bud break event listed in your forecasting system. I like to move that date just a little bit back, about two weeks prior to bud break and set it then. That’s going to account for any additional maturity or injections that might have occurred early on, it might give you a better indication of what’s happening in the weeks to come. Now, if you were to do this and leave it there, it might actually end your simulation and petal fall way too early. And we all know that even if you do set this aside, the ascospores can’t really infect green tissues. But if they are landing, then your silver tip copper will protect those tissues if there are ascospores landing on them. Indeed, if you made that silver tip copper application for inoculum reduction.
So what we’d like to do is generally as green tip approaches, leave the model, let it set its normal biofix. But as the weather warms a little bit, move that biofix back about ten days, and see if the amount or percentage of ascospores greatly increases. That might help you better assess the actual level of dose going out in an infection event. And if it does increase dramatically, it might be time for one of those really fancy single site fungicides, particularly early in the season, materials with dodine are an excellent one.
Now, as you begin to approach tight cluster, you know you’re well into the season, maturity is on its way, go back and reset your biofix back to the original 50% bud break, and that will help you capture the peak and end of the releases a little better and ensure that your simulation doesn’t end too early. This can be done with any of the forecasting programs, and I tend to recommend it as well, just to look and see what could have happened if things weren’t exactly predicted correctly. And then that’s all for biofix. And from that we’ll go over the weekly forecast for apple scab for the week.
All right, let’s talk about disease forecasting this week. 3/24 we’ve had a fairly interesting time. We had an early start and then we had a huge bout of really cold, snowy weather. And now we’re about ready to go into some warm weather coming up in the week.
Let’s take a look at the locations on Long Island, and using the Riverhead station, it looks like we have about almost 17% ascospore maturity. And luckily with the cold weather, only a 10% weekly spore release. Now, there is still a moderate risk of infection this week and also should be noted that you almost had 3.25” of rainfall on 3/23 that’s been predicted. So even if you had covered up last week, and even though there’s a little event coming up this week as well, it might be worthwhile after that three inches of rain or so, if you can, to make sure the trees are covered, with some sort of protectant, biological if you’re organic, or maybe a conventional standard, Captan, Mancozeb, if you’re a conventional grower.
Alright, what’s happening in the Hudson Valley as well? They’re also probably got some of that rain a little bit as well. And you’ve already been at green tip for about two weeks. There’s still time to make a urea application on the orchard floor. And if things had been really cold and there hasn’t been a lot of infections out there, you can still put on a silver tip copper. It’s probably going to be okay. In terms of apple scab infections, a low 6% maturity with a weekly release of about 1%. Not a lot of risk this week.
As we move up into the Capital Region at Voorheesville, we get further and further away from the rainfall that happened just the other day on Saturday, March 23. And once again, you may not even be at green tip. You’re still about 19 degree days away. The degrees aren’t getting lower because the weather has been very cold. They will ramp up and you’ll be definitely into green tip everywhere this week. Good chance to get on your urea if you haven’t gotten to the orchard floor or that application of copper at silver tip or even green can get in there and keep that overwintering primary inoculum down for both scab and fire blight. No risk of infection this week.
If you’re moving up into the Champlain Valley, still even further away from green tip, you might not even get it this week, but you could, depending on how much heat you end up getting in your area. Again, if you have dry weather and you can get that tractor into the orchard, the copper at silver tip and make sure your urea is on and you’re all set and golden.
Finger Lakes, we were right on point with the Hudson Valley almost two weeks ago. Depending on where you were in the Finger Lakes, particularly in the Ithaca and Interlaken regions, that’s the site that we’re looking for. That same thing. You can get your urea on. You can probably put your copper on this week to try to get that primary inoculum down.
Wayne County, much like the Finger Lakes as well, we’re looking at no real infections. Just a 4% on the weekly maturity and just a little blip of 3% release for the week. Just a little blip in there with the rain. Not a lot of risk, just a good opportunity to get your broken buds covered with the copper or whatever you want to put on.
In terms of moving up into Niagara, they’re closer, they’re warmer along the lake. And in the Wayne County, we were looking at the sort of lakeside as well. But even that lakeside in the Wayne County area got just enough heat. Things could be at green tip as well. If you’re not, you’re just a few degree days away. Another good opportunity to get that urea on and get that copper. There’s no risk. You’re just right there with Wayne County Lakeside, just no risk of infection. And yes, things are different further inland from the water, but in this case, it’s not appreciably different. There’s no massive infections coming up. All right. And with that, have a great week and we’ll catch up with you next week on what’s happening.
State of the State with Anna Wallis
And now for the state of the state, your weekly roundup of degree day accumulations and phenology from major fruit production regions across the state. For our listeners from last season and new folks joining us this year, in this section of the podcast, we give a brief review of the tree and insect phenology development in major production regions around the state. The information we will be sharing has been aggregated from regional specialists around the state, including the Eastern New York Commercial Horticulture program, the Lake Ontario Fruit program, and other groups. This includes Mike Basedow, Janet van Zoeren, Mario Miranda Sazo, and Dan Donahue. It also includes our own observations and information collected from NEWA.
The past few weeks we’ve seen a dramatically early spring in parts of the northeast and New York. But just what is the extent of this? The week of March 11, everyone seemed to jump ahead of the 30 year normals, after a considerable warmup, temperatures reached into the 70s in some places across the state. But this past week there was a return to winter weather, with lows in the teens and many locations on Thursday and Friday nights, and up to a foot of snow in northern parts of the state. As a result, there’s been little further phenological progress.
Tree fruit phenology across the state at this time includes in the Hudson Valley we’re approximately a 10% green tip on earlier varieties like Ginger Gold and McIntosh. Not much progress has been made since the week of 3/18. We’re likely to hit green tip later this week or early next week.
In western New York, it’s been a different story. We had green tip on most varieties the week of March 11 following a dramatic warmup, but since then most things haven’t moved very much.
Luckily, in northern New York, in the capital region and the Champlain Valley, we’re still at dormant or early silver tip.
To get an idea of the numerical differences in degree days compared to historical averages, we looked at the Climate Smart Farming tool, which was developed at Cornell University. This tool shows seasonal average degree day accumulation for the locations throughout the state. Similar data is available on [the] NEWA degree day calculator as well. The link to the climate smart farming tool can be found in the show notes [and here]. Additional information can be found in the Cornell Tree Fruit guidelines, table 7.1.4, which shares degree day accumulations from January 1, corresponding to selected fruit phenology and arthropod pest events. The 2024 Tree Fruit guidelines are in the final stages of publication and will be available as soon as possible. We apologize for any delay in getting them to you this season.
In the meantime, we have a couple of announcements of upcoming plans for the season. First of all, we have a statewide insect pest monitoring network which includes collaborators from Cornell, Cornell Cooperative Extension, growers, and other industry members, each of which will be contributing trap captures weekly from their monitoring efforts. These data will be integrated into a map showing real time insect activity across the state. If you’re interested in participating or contributing, please reach out to me, Anna Wallis, my email will be in the show notes (aew232@cornell.edu).
Also, we have a virtual scout training planned for Monday, April 15 from 2:00 to 04:00 p.m. This is intended for farmers, farm employees, and other industry members with IPM and pest management responsibilities. Looking for a new or refresher training? The virtual training will include myself, Mike Basedow from the Eastern New York Commercial Horticulture program, and Janet van Zoeren from the Lake Ontario Fruit team broadcasting from orchards live in their region to discuss best practices for monitoring. We’ll also review monitoring and scouting procedures for major economically significant pests, and we’ll share resources available for helping scout and identify pests and forecast pests accordingly. To register, you can visit the registration in the Zoom link or look for updates in your regional weekly email updates.
Degree Days with Kelsey Tobin
Hey everyone, it’s Kelsey Tobin here to give you the current degree days in the major fruit producing regions of the state, as well as the projections through the end of the week. We’ll be aligning this information with some previous work done by Art Agnello relating to Macintosh phenology and degree days we’re still in the early season in most regions of the state and are at or around silver and green tip for Macintosh, silver tip is at or around 58 to 106 degree days at 43 F base temperature and green tip is at or around 99 to 144 degree days at that 43 base temp.
Here in Geneva we are at 74 degree days and projected to reach 83 degree days by the end of the week. In Highland we’re sitting at 94 degree days, projected to be at 102 by the end of this week. Clifton park is at 48 degree days, projected 51 by the end of the week. Peru is at a whopping twelve degree days and projected to reach 16 by the end of the week. Those trees are still dormant in Peru. In Medina more at about 88 degree days, projected to be 92 this week. Appleton North has 66 degree days, projected to be 69 by the end of the week, and Williamson Mason is at 67, projected 75 by the end of the week, and Williamson DeMarree is at 83, projected 89 by the end of the week. Most of these trees are in silver tip and entering green tip in all of these regions in the area.
Despite the low temperatures and snow events that we’ve had in some of the areas of the Lake Ontario fruit region this past week and weekend, bud development has reached green tissue in McIntosh, Gala, Pink Lady and several other varieties in Medina, Albion, Waterport and other Lake Ontario fruit regions. Trees are still dormant in Peru, but the rest of the state is in silver and green tip. Warmer weather is expected for the remainder of this week and will start to accumulate a few more degree days. Talk to you all next week.
Monique Rivera: That concludes this week’s update. Thanks for listening!
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