Strawberry Trouble

We had a frost care on Friday night so Jeff and the guys put the row covers back on. I am so glad that I had a meeting that day and didn't have to put those things back on. Then on Saturday afternoon they went back up to the farm and took the covers off. Jeff then went walking through the rows to check out the plants and make sure they were progressing as they should be.

He noticed a few looked like they were wilting-not alot just a few here and there. So he put flags by each plant that didn't look quite right. There may have been about a dozen plants in all that were flagged.
He pulled up a couple and cut into the crown of the plant and notcied that it had starting rotting. This is not a good thing and he called it one of those fifty cent words (as my grandma says) that tells what kind of fungus it had. No need to worry we got the medicine for it and put it through the drip irrigation. I hope it works because a pint of the "medicine" was $98.

This is a picture of one of the plants that was too far gone to be saved. We were going to take the plants that Jeff had pulled up Saturday to Taylor at the local Ag office to have him see what it looked like to him. We ran into him at Lowe's and he just went straight to the farm so he could see what they looked like before being pulled up.

This Taylor pulling up one of the infected plants. You can't see it from this photo but the main roots coming from the plant were dead.

This is the same plant as the previous picture. Taylor had cut open the crown of the plant and you could see the dark spot in it where it was rotting. Apparently there are 2 fungi that have similar symptoms. One is far worse than the other and luckily each plant he pulled up looked like it had the less damaging fungus.

And this is Taylor. He is a great guy and is always there to answer any questions you may have. He took 2 grocery bags of pulled plants back to the office with him to send off to get tested for us. He said he would mark it rush so we should have something back by the end of the week with a definite as to what is wrong with the plants. That way we can treat the others and hopefully not lose too many more plants.