Almost 50 people attended our summer field day Tuesday, August 2nd.  I gave a brief update on the data I've been collecting this season on greedy scale insects.  Don Kloft gave a nice presentation on fruit rot and fungicide use, and Ramesh Sagili, from Oregon State, gave a really excellent and helpful presentation on bee biology and safety.  I don't have Ramesh's presentation, but I am posting both mine and Don's here.  I think eventually I'll post them in a different location on the website, but I'm not sure where that will be yet.  

So .... here you go, as promised!

It looks like (perhaps) we have reached the peak point for crawler emergence … right smack in the middle of bloom.  Great.  This graph is pretty busy, but Basically, the red line is the % adults out there that had live crawlers in them … it looks like that number has leveled off in our control (untreated) sites that we’re using for a baseline.  The number of live scale per upright has decreased a bit as well (blue bars), which makes me wonder if perhaps last week or so was the peak emergence time, and the adults are dying off after releasing their eggs. 

No big changes on the scale front.  Since I began observing a few crawlers last week UNDER the scale cover, I decided to monitor twice weekly.  So far, nothing's changed.  This week I found ONE crawler on the stem, which is new.  Of the 237 live scale I observed this time around, 9 of the adults had a couple live crawlers under their armor (that's about 4%).  Remember, those live crawlers are 2 out of 40 or more eggs.  The bottom line: I think we're still early.  I was hoping for more development over this past week, especially with the warm weekend we had, but I'm just not seeing it yet.

Hi all,

I collected my weekly greedy scale samples yesterday (Tuesday, 4/27) and looked at them today.

It looks like we’re really getting close to crawler emergence – maybe we’ll even beat bloom!

I saw A LOT of live scale incubating eggs … that’s what most everyone is doing right now:  incubating.

I’ve got some good news:  Those who attend the April 12^th Twilight Meeting (next Tuesday) will receive 2 Oregon Pesticide Recertification Credits. 

When:        4pm.  April 12^th.  We should be done by 6 at the latest.

Where:       Delmar Robison’s Shop.
                 54048 Rosa Road, Bandon

Scale insect update.

GREEDY SCALE:  As promised, I've been monitoring greedy scale infestations so that I can alert you all when their crawlers hatch.  If you remember, with these greedy scale (an armored scale), the best time to treat them is when their eggs hatch and the crawlers emerge.  The crawler stage is short (just a few days) and is when these scale insects are most susceptible to treatment.  

I have three locations that I'm monitoring for greedy scale: one north in Bandon, one in between Bandon and Langlois, and one south of Langlois.

Saturday, March 5, 2016, was the day of the first Oregon Organic Grower Meeting.  Twenty-five people attended, most of which were growers.  Drew Katz of Oregon Tilth gave a nice presentation on the process involved in becoming certified organic. It’s quite the process, and it requires you to keep a lot of records, but it’s definitely not impossible or too overwhelming … many growers have either completed the process, or are in the middle of their transition period.

Here are a few of the highlights I picked up from the meeting: