Fruit and Vegetable News

  Annalisa Hultberg, Extension Educator, food safety No farm is complete without a dedicated space and some sort of equipment for safely washing and packing produce. You do not need to spend a lot of money to have a safe, efficient and comfortable location to wash and pack your produce.  Non-mechanized postharvest equipment Spray tables and wash basins are the most basic and essential infrastructure to include in your packshed design. Spray tables Spray tables are used to spray bunched crops, pack boxes and more. Tables can be easily built using a variety of designs and materials. They consist of a frame (built from wood or metal), and a top with gaps that allow dirty water to run off the table as the produce is sprayed. Spray tables are the most effective option for cleaning bunched crops. Whatever spray table you build should be strong enough to hold the produce you will place on it and large enough to spray a good amount of produce at one time. Spray table with wooden frame...

Originally written by Annie Klodd, former University of Minnesota Extension Educator, in April 2020. Updated for formatting by Madeline Wimmer in 2025. (Reviewed by: Dr. Bob Blanchette and Dr. Brett Arenz, UMN Department of Plant Pathology The Great Lakes Fruit Workers Group contributed research-based information to inform this article.) Apple tree with a canker suspected to be black rot.  Photo used by permission of the grower. A number of factors including diseases, herbicide damage, insect/animal activity, and winter injury can all contribute to trunk cankers on fruit trees. To complicate things further, these factors can interact. For example, winter injury can cause cracks in the trunk, which pathogens can then enter and infect the tree. Treatment of existing trunk cankers is not always possible, but identifying the cause will lead to determining management steps to prevent it from happening again. Diagnosing fruit tree trunk cankers  Because the causes of trunk can...