Accumulated wetting hours for the sooty blotch/flyspeck threshold

For purposes of predicting the development of the sooty blotch and flyspeck (SBFS) fungal complex, we record accumulated wetting hours, starting 10 days after petal fall. This year we have settled on May 3 as our petal fall start date, so the start of wetting hour accumulation is from May 13, 25 days later than last year. As of Monday morning, May 27, we had accumulated 58 wetting hours toward the 250 wetting hour threshold for specific treatment against the SBFS fungal complex. A caution to those further south and east of the Blue Ridge: Your petal fall date may have been a week or more ahead of ours and the earlier date would include the wet week of May 5, adding 80-100 more accumulated wetting hours to this total. Last year we reached the 250-hr threshold at our AREC May 25.