Fruit and Vegetable News

Author: Natalie Hoidal Fall cover crop planting is right around the corner, and this blog post is full of resources to help you with species selection, seeding rate, and seeding methods.  Choosing a cover crop The first step to choosing a cover crop for fall is knowing when you'll be able to plant it. Some crops like oats, peas, and tillage radish are better suited to early fall planting since they die over the winter and need some time to get established before a hard freeze. Others like winter rye, winter wheat, hairy vetch, and red clover survive the winter and grow in the spring, so they can be planted a bit later.  For an overview of each of these cover crops and their pros and cons in a vegetable production system, check out our page titled Cover Crop Selection for Vegetable Growers .  Another great resources is the Midwest Cover Crop Council Decision Tool. To use this tool, select the county you farm in and (if you'd like) your goals for the cover crop. The tool w...

Author: Marissa Schuh Growers have been reporting soilborne issues in tunnels from rhizoctonia in lettuces to tomato pathogens like Verticillium. One way of dealing with these pathogens is to starve them of oxygen, killing the microbes -- be they fungi, oomycetes, nematodes or bacteria. Bottom rot in lettuce caused by the soil borne pathogen Rhizoctonia solani. Photo: Gerald Holmes, Strawberry Center, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, Bugwood.org The process of killing pathogens this way is called Anaerobic Soil Disinfestation (I know, I hadn’t thought of anaerobic vs aerobic since gym class).  It has a big name, but it's a relatively simple process. There are three steps in anaerobic soil disinfestation... 1. Add a carbon source This will feed the beneficial microbes who are going to take the oxygen out of the system. The most common and most effective carbon source is molasses, but researchers have been exploring alternative carbon sources like wheat middlings and cover c...