Cedar Apple Rust - Scouting Help Needed

Do you live in NW Iowa and have an Eastern Red-cedar tree, or more specifically a Juniperus virginians, near you?  We could use your help!  Last year most of our orchard was infected with cedar apple rust (CAR). It comes from participating in the life cycle of the fungi called Gymnosporangium juniperi-virginianae which as you can tell by the name of the fungi lives on Juniperus virginians - the Eastern Red-cedar.  Iowa has a lot of Eastern Red-cedar trees and they even grow in road ditches.  Cedar apple rust requires two hosts to complete its lifecycle. The cedar tree is the primary host and an apple tree, or several other types of trees as secondary hosts.  

We are managing our orchard with Integrated Pest Management (more on that in another post). Basically we will utilize all of the methods, information, scientific models and predictors that we can to avoid applying pesticides.  In the case of CAR, it has a pretty specific environment that it lives in, and has to be released from the cedar tree to infect the apple orchard.  

So this is where you can help.  If you have a cedar tree in your yard or somewhere that you pass everyday, take a look and see if you see any galls on it that look similar to this:

If you do, those are probably the fungi galls that causes CAR.  Drop us an email and let us know.  

Then if you see the galls turn into this: 

Definitely drop us an email, because this is when they produce horns that disperse the spores in an attempt to transfer it to its other host, possibly an apple tree.

Thanks for the help.

2014 Read or Not

The farm has been coming out of hibernation the past few weeks and so the activity around the farm has really picked up.  We've been getting the water lines reconnected so that we can move the cows out of their winter paddock, water the raspberries in the high tunnel, and water the apple trees once they need it. Sharon picked up the broiler chicks this morning too, so you know that things are really about to get busy.