Controlling Fire Blight

Controlling Fire Blight. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Fruit Grower Report.

Fire blight is one of those nasty things that tree fruit growers have to contend with and not with certain chemicals no longer available for orchardists to use, how do you control fire blight? Ken Johnson with OSU.

JOHNSON: You know the issue now that we’re looking at is the loss of these materials after the 2014 season and so our project has been focused on floral infection in fire blight susceptible cultivars which are the majority of organic pome fruits and of course the majority of organic pome fruits come from Central Washington.

Johnson says they have been looking at several different things.

JOHNSON: We’ve been looking at the old question of when does fire blight become active in bloom. And we were looking at down in California the old practice of delayed dormant copper on this activity and can we really suppress and sanitize fire blight out of an orchard.

He says that you can...and you can’t.

JOHNSON: You can push back the growth, the detectability of the fire blight pathogen in the orchard but you can’t exclude it completely.

Johnson was addressing the issue of thinning using lime sulphur which he believes is a very important part of the fire blight control instead of using antibiotic control. Tomorrow we will dig a little deeper into this issue with Ken Johnson.

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