(This is a copy of this week’s specialty crop grower email… shoot Maryellen an email if you want to get on the mailing list or have access to any of the shared articles: ms3573@cornell.edu!)
Hi everyone,
I hope that July is treating you and your fields well, given how crazy up and down everything seems to be on the weather front this summer. We’ve been getting a fair number of pest reports at the office, but with no one single insect or disease dominating so far. Fortunately, our county has been spared the flooding rains, and it seems like some towns were largely missed by any rain, and still are on the dry side.
While we are gearing up for Open Farm Day at the CCE office (come join us on Saturday, July 29th to visit some of your neighboring farms!), we are still available to help with cropping, pest, and disease issues.
Please also reach out any time with suggestions of topics or crops you would like to see more info on. I’m starting to get together a late fall (Nov/Dec) vegetable focused shop meeting, so if you have any issues showing up now that you’d like to be covered there, I would love to hear them and start tracking down presenters.
On the disease alert front across the wider region and state:
- Cucumber powdery and downy mildew are out and about (no local DM reports, thankfully), so growers of fall pumpkins may want to keep an eye out. https://www.vegetables.cornell.edu/crops/cucurbits/downy-mildew/
- Angular leaf spot has been showing up widely in NY on cucurbits, including in county, and it can look like a DM copy-cat at first glance. Here’s what some of the milder initial cases may look like: https://extension.umn.edu/disease-management/angular-leaf-spot#using-pesticides-3086662. There’s more chance to control this before it hits, but if you can catch it early, there are a few products (including coppers) with a bit of efficacy.
- Tuesday there was an unconfirmed, but likely, tomato late blight case over the lake in Ontario. Growers of field tomatoes may want to start monitoring the weather and applying any prophylactic sprays as needed (in particular, some of the organic control options only work when sprayed as a preventative application before LB arrives https://www.vegetables.cornell.edu/crops/tomatoes/late-blight/). Fortunately, our upcoming forecast is not especially favorable for spreading!
For longer articles this week (you can email ms3573@cornell.edu for them!), I included:
- Cultural Controls to Reduce Fall Alternaria in Brassicas—these are some of the results from our trials last year looking for additional ways to deal with all the added disease pressure that seems to come with those heavy fall rains.
- Understanding and Preventing Herbicide Drift—this may not apply to every farm, but there’s been some drift issues this summer in other parts of the state, especially on farms with mixed field crop/specialty crop production systems. Here are some ways to minimize risk to those more sensitive veg and fruit crops.
- Managing Tomato Bacterial Diseases with Biopesticides—we are lucky in NY that copper still has high efficacy against these diseases, but there are risks of copper building up in the soil over time. Here’s some interesting data on alternates to add to your program.
Finally, Liza has been updating our local food map (https://ccemadison.org/agriculture/ag-economic-development/buy-local/madison-county-local-food-map). If you have a farmstand that you want added, please let us know.
Thank you for all your work, stay cool, and happy farming, Maryellen