As of yesterday morning, July 15, at our AREC we had accumulated 345 wetting hours, well beyond the 250-hr threshold. Last week sooty blotch/flyspeck symptoms were readily apparent on non-protected trees in our fungicide test blocks. By now it might be showing up in poorly protected commercial blocks as well.
I have been away for two periods of more than a week twice in the past month, and being away for a week seems to suddenly bring out some readily visible changes that appeared while I was away. Three weeks ago I noticed that more fireblight had shown up. A lot of this was advancement of symptoms from blossom blight on late, unprotected bloom; others appeared to be from shoot tip infection (shoot blight) related to secondary infection during storms.
Another change three weeks ago, but even more obvious this week, is the intensifying orange glow from cedar-apple rust on unprotected backyard York Imperial apple trees. York is very susceptible to cedar-apple rust, and even moderate amounts of infection can significantly reduce return bloom and yield the following year. It will be interesting to see how much bloom is present on these heavily infected trees next year. Two or three sprays of the readily available Immunox fungicide from mid-April to mid-May would have prevented most of this problem.
At risk of jinxing what appears to be a good corn crop coming on, I will say that it is always a good indicator of what the weather was like in the past couple weeks. Three weeks ago I was sure it had grown 2 feet in a week; now this week it is tall and all in tassel.
By the way, our hike in Glacier Park turned up more hawthorn rust than grizzlies!
