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.

Raspberries Done for 2013

We opened the high tunnel to let the raspberries go dormant for the winter.  It's supposed to get down into the single digits F over the next couple of days.  My plan is to try to keep the high tunnel open for most of the winter, but I'm not sure if that is a good idea or not.  My hope is that the high tunnel can handle being open when we get high wind storms during the winter. I don't want to close the high tunnel and have the temps popping up and triggering the raspberries to break their dormancy too early, or not be dormant enough and damaging the raspberries with freeze thaw.  Time will tell I guess.  One thing is for sure.  We won't have any greens out of the high tunnel this year.

Berries Too Cold

I think I may have let the raspberries get too cold one night last week.  When I got up in the morning it was 27F at about 5am.  I didn't check to see how long it was down that low, but I figured it had to be quite a while.  I've only run the heater for a few nights this fall, so I turned on the heater in the high tunnel, but I think it was too late. The quality of the ripe berries is poor. I'm hoping that the berries that are still unripe will ripen well, but we won't know until we get some sun on the plants and see how they move forward.  Guess we'll know as the week goes on.

Raspberry Production Year 1

The raspberry plants are producing really well.  We had thought that the first year production would be light, but it turns out that our production is really good for our first year.  So much so that we are getting 4 to 5 pints a day, not including what we're eating (which is substantial).

Raspberry Heat Stress White Drupelet Disorder

We're currently seeing heat stress in our raspberries. It started showing up even before it got extremely hot, but it was limited to one here and there. But the past couple of days we've seen it really hitting the Heritage variety of raspberries.  What we're seeing are some white drupes within the drupelet.

1. Drupe - The fleshy fruit with a single seed. In a raspberry or blackberry, it would be each of the individual tiny round balls of fruit that make up a cluster in what is considered the berry.
2. Drupelet - The individual drupes that in composite are considered the berry on plants such as raspberry or blackberry.

So what we're seeing is called White Drupelet Disorder.  Looking that up I found that it can be caused by a handful of issues, but one being excessive heat.
Imagine that?  A plant that's in a greenhouse, even with its sides open and the end-wall door wide open, would show signs of heat stress in NW Iowa from this past week. The high tunnel weather station showed a hight temp of 109F two days ago.  I'd say that qualifies as excessive heat. The Heritage raspberry variety is more susceptible to the disorder, and the variety showing the most symptoms is Heritage, but the others that are producing right now are showing it here and there too. They don't taste any different, but they aren't very pretty.

Final Chicken Day 2013

The second day of 2013 chicken processing went great.  Our customers are a big part of making it a lot of fun.  Thanks to all of our customers and we look forward to seeing you again next year.  Enjoy your chickens!