Fanleaf Disease Part 2. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Fruit Grower Report.

My wife loves to garden. She can usually get just about anything to grow and she loves to try different things so she will often ask someone if she can have a small cutting from an unusual or different kind of plant thus expanding her own garden. Some grape growers also like to take cuttings from different varieties of grape vine and as innocent as that may sound, it might just be a catastrophic mistake according to Naidu Rayapati, Assistant Professor of Virology & Plant Pathology at WSU’s Irrigated Agriculture Research & Extension Center. He says it’s important to get your plants from a reliable source like a nursery.

RAYAPATI: The second is to contact scientists at WSU like me to see if we can help them to test the material to ensure that the planting material is free from serious problems like fanleaf disease.

Fanleaf disease is similar to leaf roll disease but are transmitted in different ways. Leaf roll is transmitted through insects while fanleaf is transmitted through nematode in the soil and both can decimate a crop.

RAYAPATI: The best option is to remove the infected grapevine to make sure there is no infected material around. As long as you don’t have the nematode vector there is no spread of the disease.

Rayapati says that while they have found fanleaf disease in Washington State, to date they have not found any trace of the nematode vector and hope to keep it that way.

That’s today’s Fruit Grower Report. I’m Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.