Practical steps to disease-free crops: Spence Gunn looks at cultural controls to counter pathogen spread

摘要

With a restricted range of fungicides, and the need to use them sparingly to reduce the risk of resistance occurring, it makes sense if your primary means of disease control is to manage the nursery environment. The key is to know the conditions thatfavour the spread of the pathogens most likely to attack your crop, and then manage the growing environment to avoid them. But you also need to adapt your strategy to the conditions - last year's hot, dry summer favoured a different combination of pestsand diseases to this year's long periods of rain. So far this year, powdery mildews have been the biggest disease problem. Awareness of the need to ventilate tunnels and space crops to aid air movement means growers have generally seen less Botrytisthanmight have been expected.