 My name is Ed Secora, I'm an extension plant pathologist with the Auburn University. My email, in case you wanna contact me later, is S-I-K-O-R-E-J at Auburn.edu. I also post a lot on Twitter and my Twitter handles Alabama Ed, but post a lot of pictures of sick plants. Start off with some healthy looking strawberries. This is down at, slide on the left is Burr's Farms, down in Baldwin County or in Foley, Alabama. Many of you probably know his operation. He's been doing it for 30 years. Does a great job, walk through that field and could not find any disease that day, which I guess I was happy to see. On the right is a nice basket of fresh strawberries picked at Dempsey Farm, which is just north of Auburn near South of Lafayette. That's pretty much what you're aiming for to produce as a grower. Unfortunately, you get problems like this. And leaf blades on the left, you can get root rods and crown rods in the center and also fruit rods on the right, which are showing up right about now. And all these can be cost a significant amount of money. And in some cases, devastate the crop. I like to start off with just this simple definition of what a plant disease is. And I define it as any disturbance to a plant that interferes with its normal growth and development. Talk about biotic diseases, which are caused by living agents, such as bacteria, fungi, nematodes, viruses. And then abiotic diseases caused by non-living agents, often related to mother nature, maybe flooding, cold weather and so forth, frost injury. Just a couple of examples of abiotic diseases. This poor pollination I saw in Edgar's area up in Clanton, possibly this poor pollination leading to this disfigured fruit kind of looks like a bird. A raid was sunscaled from fruit on a black plastic molesters years ago, but it went from relatively cold or warm and those fruit were exposed and you had damage like that. So abiotic problems are out there, insect problems are out there like Ash had just talked about. We're gonna talk about strawberry diseases. Broke these down into a few leaf spots called fungal and bacterial. Two crown roots, rootrots and anthracnose and phytopterum. Then we'll talk more heavily on the fruitrots, which are probably the most obvious ones, especially this time of year during harvest season. So patritus, anthracnose, fruitrod, neopestolosciopsis, which I keep pronouncing, new disease that Dr. Connor and our diagnostic lab detected not long ago this year. And it also will rise up this route which oftentimes shows up post-harvest many times in your kitchen refrigerator or on your kitchen counter. As far as the leaf spots are concerned, we do have a couple fungal leaf spot problems that are common in backyard gardens more than in commercial fields, I'd say. This is strawberry leaf spot or common leaf spot caused by a fungal pathogen. Oftentimes you see these tan, the brown lesions around them by a darker margin. These can be red, purple and color. You can see on the left, many of these lesions start to merge and you get blighting of the foliage and eventually fall off. And typically these show up on the older leaves of the plant. And if you're not on a fungicide spray program, these are gonna probably pop up. This is a strawberry leaf blight, another disease. Sometimes you see both those diseases on the same plant. Oftentimes you get these tannish lesions. In the center you can see some target-like patterns developing on the right. You can see where these lesions start to merge. And many times you'll see almost like a U or a V-shaped lesion extending out to the leaf edge and that leaf eventually turns brown and dies. Both of these diseases are pretty easily controlled with fungicides. So with common, it first appears a small round, purplish red spots on the upper leaf surface. Leaf death can occur when numerous spots merge. And many of these, this is often introduced into fields on infected transplants. And I highlight infected transplants because I think with just about every disease I talk about today, one of the ways the disease gets started is coming in on infected material. Common leaf spot is spread within a field by splashing water. High rainfall, warm temperatures will favor rapid disease development. As far as leaf blight, the spots become target-like and only have a purple or yellow or even a yellow margin to them. Older lesions are, as I mentioned, I usually V-shaped at the leaf edge leading to a blight of the entire leaf. And similar weather conditions favor leaf blight as leaf spots. So that's why I say, oftentimes you might see these together in the same field. I mentioned resistant varieties. I believe there are a few that have resistance to these pathogens. Disease-free transplants, when you do get your transplants in, clean up some of the dead tissue on them and then applying a protective fungicide. So a product like CapTan applied before these diseases show up, control them well. CapTan, some of the other protecting materials that are used by commercial growers do a great job on keeping these in check. More times than not, I see it late in the season when the fungicide programs have been abandoned or in home garden situations. Next disease is angular leaf spot. And this is a bacterial disease. It's the only bacterial disease we'll talk about today. But it gets its name from the very sharp angles to the lesions caused by the pathogen. The bacteria get inside the leaf tissue, but they have a hard time processing some of those major veins. So you get these sharp angular lesions. So it's fairly easy to pick up on the field once you get used to seeing it. Typically, it's a cooler weather disease, likes it wet like most of these diseases, but a cooler weather pathogen. So it begins as small water-soaked yellow lesions on the lower leaf. Yellow flecks will develop on the upper surface and they'll eventually turn that reddish brown color. And the lesions will enlarge to become these angular spots sort of merge more or less. They're limited by the leaf veins. Symptoms could also be visible on the calyx of the fruit, and I'll show you a slide of this, but the bacterium does not actually go to the fruit, but that calyx damage does reduce marketability of that infected fruit. Now the bacterium can't survive on dead leaves in the field, so it can be there from one year to the next. It could also be introduced on transplants. And then plant-to-plant movement within the field is by splashing water. And I mentioned cooler temperatures favor angular leaf spot. So with management, we're looking at disease-free planting stock, purchasing from a reputable dealer. I do recommend copper fungicides when this disease shows up as they can be effective in reducing bacterial problems and also help you with some of your fungal leaf spots. You got to watch with coppers and sulfur products, some of these products because they can cause a foliar burn. If they're overused or if temperatures suddenly, you know, in Alabama, they might be 90 degrees tomorrow, some of these products can't be more, can't cause actual burns in a plant and cause more damage than the pathogen itself. So be careful with them, read the label before using it. So a couple early development of angular leaf spot on the left and center. If you were to cut one of those lesions with a razor blade and stick it on a dye set or a micro compound scope in the lab, which you would see the bacterial ooze coming out. That's that gray and the slide on the right, that gray mass of spores coming out. That's probably thousands of bacterial spores oozing from one single lesion. And that's why these diseases really take off these bacterial problems under the right conditions. So with angular leaf spot, we mentioned water sulking. And an example of that is on the left, on the lower half of that leaf, you can see kind of just a dark, almost like a water droplet that's drying off and that's water sulking. And that'd be the initial symptom for angular leaf spot. You could hold those leaves up to the sun as I did on the right. And then you can see those yellow flecks where the pathogen causes initial affection site. And then eventually that'll turn reddish brown to bacterium, move and reproduce rapidly. And there's damage in the calyx I mentioned. And this I noticed years ago now, but I was able to get bacterial ooze from the calyx, it dries down, making that fruit a little bit less likely to be picked by a you picker in your operation. It doesn't go to the fruit, but damage has already been done when that fruit looks. So angular leaf spot, not a problem this year. At least I haven't seen it in a couple of years to be honest with you, but it's out there along with your other leaflets. Wanted to move down into the soil, into the crown of the plant, a couple of crown and root rot diseases, namely anthracnose crown rot and then phytopter root and crown rot. And phytopter is, we have that, probably the most common problem coming through the diagnostic lab, according to Dr. Connor or fine diagnostician. Anthracnose crown rot oftentimes, if it comes in on transplants, it could be a significant problem to growers. On the left, what happens is they'll plant their plants and then in a short time, many of these plants will start to die off. You see a plant in the center that has both phytopter and spider mites. Ash had a nice slide, it almost looks identical to that one. On the right is what I believe is phytopter. Dr. Connor noticed this field in a Bruton a few, a couple of months ago, diagnosed phytopter in the field and grower lost plants, but with phytopter, sometimes those plants will revive themselves basically, but they'll show that stunting that you see on the right side of that bed. So with anthracnose, what you're gonna see is, well, it may attack the crowns. Anthracnose has, there's three different species of anthracnose and some are more common as, one is more common for the crown rot phase. And I'll talk about anthracnose fruit rot later, which is typically a different species. You get different phases of the same seeds, but plants may die after being transferred to the field infected plants. The wilted plants will have a reddish brown crown. So if you cut the crown open longitudinally, and I'll show you a slide of this, you'll see this discoloration on the inside, it'll be a firm rot of the crown. Can't be hard to ID based on crown symptoms of dying plants, because the crowns typically turn brown in short order. So, which the same thing happens with frost injury, flooding, the plant dies, the crown's gonna turn brown in a short period of time. But infected transplants seem to be the main source of the disease in Alabama. So in management, you wanna plant disease-free material when possible, hard to pick up this disease by looking at the transplants as they come in, scout the field early on and remove dying plants as soon as possible. So even in the fall after planting or in a really winter period, look for plants that are dying, check to see if they might have symptoms of anthraknose and then discard those as quickly as possible so it doesn't spread. Then as the season progresses, you wanna follow a protective fungicide program early in the season and try and keep that disease in check. So anthraknose on the left, you can see on the upper leafs, upper left corner that plant started to die down. What you wanna do is sacrifice one of those plants that is still green, but obviously on its way out and cut the stem open, the crown open, and that's when you're gonna see this reddish-brown discoloration in the crown tissue. You wait for the plant to be completely brown. It's just gonna be a brown crown and not gonna be able to tell you much of anything. And you see just symptoms of anthraknose on the left from a healthy crown to the one that is completely destroyed by it. Basically, it's a firm rot, remember? See this picture on the right is what I just showed you earlier. So anthraknose crown rot, significant disease when it does show up. Now, if I top through our root and crown rot, we used to call these water mold fungi. Guess that name from the wet conditions that this pathogen prefers. And you'll often see plants like the one on the left that just suddenly wilt and die. You don't see a progression of the disease. It just goes down quickly. Slice the stem open on that. Again, you'll look for maybe a pinkish rose color, but it can also be reddish-brown to brown in the crown, usually in the upper part of the crown. See some pictures from Dr. Conner to share with me from the lab from earlier this year, I believe, which you can see phytopter or crown rot in some of the symptoms inside of those crowns. So this disease really likes it wet. That's the main thing with these water mold pathogens. So symptoms begin in the upper part of the crown. Young leaves will suddenly, and you'll get complete collapse, excuse me, of the plant within days. And the plant sometimes will break at the upper part of the crown when you try and lift it from the soil quickly. Cut that crown longitudinally. You may see a rose-pink discoloration, usually in the upper part of the crown, or it can be brown, and eventually that'll just disintegrate. Now, when the disease is not bad and when conditions dry out, maybe you get some warm temperatures, some of these plants will recover, but they're usually gonna be stunted and not produce as much as a healthy plant during the season. Warm wet conditions, poorly drained soils favor infection. So management, especially in a commercial field, because phytophthora can't survive in the soil as a clusters of resistant type spores. Fumigation would be an option if you have a limited space for planting or if you have a heavy infection. There are resistant varieties available. You wanna provide good soil drainage when choosing a site and you wanna avoid low wet fields or fields that have a history of this disease because it can be quite devastating when it gets going. Left, you can see a plant that eventually was infected with phytophthora. On the right, as a slide I showed you earlier, would you see those plants appear to recover from phytophthora, but there are what, about one-fifth the size of those healthy plants in the left. Oftentimes you might see them in a row or a few plants together where the disease has spread from one plant to the next almost. Okay, let's get to the cool diseases, the fruterons. And this is what you're seeing now if you're picking your crop or if you're you picking yourself, gray mold, the tritus gray mold on the left and on the right you could see anthracnose fruit rub. Gray mold of course gets its name from the gray. So here's just different levels of infection and strawberry fruit from left to right, but that gray stuff you see there is fungal mycelium, the body of the fungus along with spores. On the right, it almost looks like that fruit is mummified by the pathogen. This stands out pretty much in the field. I'm sure any of you who've walked through strawberries or grow strawberries have seen this problem. It's an annual problem in Alabama. A little more common when we have wet conditions like we had last year especially and in some cases in some parts this year. This is just a close-up of what that mycelium looks like. Those are these individual hypha in the blue. And then off the hypha you get these clusters of tritus spores on the left-hand side of the screen. Looks like somebody's bringing it over some flowers. And then in that star, you can see a couple individual spores. And if you see tritus in the field and if you just see that gray mass on the fruit, just flick it with your finger sometime. If it's dry and you'll see these spore clouds come off and that's individual spores being released. One of those spores land on a neighboring fruit and they can infect the fruit directly. So gives you some idea how rapid this pathogen or how aggressive it can be. This was in an organic field last year in our region but you can see that growing mold for me. Again, if you just flick that with your finger you would see a mass of spores blown off. Typically, these fruit might show some darkening first but the mold comes off fairly quickly. I mentioned it comes in on transplants. Now this is a garden store in Lee County that when I go to a garden store, I look for diseases. I mean, most of you are probably picking out nice strawberry for healthy flowers. I look for problems. This was just from a basket of strawberries being sold. These were by the last six plants left on the store shelf but they had fruit on them, which was interesting but it also had gray mold on them. So this is something you wouldn't wanna bring to your home garden say. And definitely obviously with a commercial grower you'd wanna avoid this but it was just sort of interesting on at least in the garden center. Made for a nice picture. So with betridus gray mold, it's widespread, has numerous hosts, survives on dead plant material, rewater, cool temperatures, favorite development. So right now it's ideal with the rain we had in recent days. Green berries appear to be more resistant to infection than red berries. Management is to avoid the disease transplants which is hard to do and avoid allowing over ripened fruit to sit in the field. That's probably the biggest problem where growers have extended themselves more acres than they needed. They can't pick them fast enough in these fruit to just start to rot in the field. So what you'd like to do is remove and destroy the disease fruit and Ash earlier talked about removing fruit with damage from insects. And the same thing with betridus. You would like to get, take those fruit off the plant and then get them out of the field and bury them. I know a number of growers that they have time to remove the fruit thrown in the center of the row but then they leave them there. They can't pick them up because they don't have enough time or enough people power and that's still a source of inoculum. This disease can be controlled with fungicides on a strict schedule. You need to get ahead of it. Capstan is always a nice product to add to your mix but there's a number of other products of different chemistries that are available. Dr. Connor, Dr. Vincent and myself have been doing, we've been doing some resistant profiling of fields over the last year and a half looking for populations of betridus that are resistant to different fungicide classes working with a professor over at the University of Georgia were continuing this project. But we found in about 80% of the fields that many of the betridus populations were resistant to the class one, I believe it was class 11 fungicides. So products like topsemam would be people spraying and we're not having any benefits from it. And I think class 11 was the other one where we were having problems with things like a bound just not effective any longer. And that's problem throughout the Southeast, it's not in Alabama. Now with direct nose fruit rod is also occurring. We saw it in about 25% of the fields last year also seeing resistance to this fellow in some of the products. But we don't see it as common as betridus but it was out there last year and I did see it this year. It has that telltale kind of a sunken area on the fruit. They could range from tan to brown to black. On the right, that was a field on Bruton that had five or six fruit on one plant. Have to just move from plant to plant. Just different examples of enthrachnos. I think the one in the upper left hand corner you can see the initial symptom in it. It almost looks like a thumb print on these and that one but that might be the initial symptom and then you start getting more darkening of the tissue and the spores are then produced off that tissue as well. So the source of the pathogen is also from nursery stock but it's higher to detect coming on in. Disease itself is favored by rain, high humidity, warm temperatures, all common situations in Alabama. Rain and wind can spread the disease across a field fairly quickly. And then the dark lesions can't form on green fruit but also on mature fruit as well. Then management is the buy plants from a reputable nursery, one that you or your colleagues have had luck with in the past plant enthrachnos are resisting cultivars. I threw sweet Charlie up here as one and Edgar I hope that's the correct variety but there are some available for resistance to enthrachnos and you want to monitor fields for hot spots of enthrachnos and then remove infected plants, not just the fruit but whole affected plants. You might be able to limit the amount of damage you see in the field from this disease or amount of spread. So the grower I talked to had enthrachnos on his fruit a couple of weeks ago. I told him, remove that plant and a couple of plants next to it and you might be able to compartmentalize that disease and keep it from spreading rapidly. Another disease when you take those fruit off you also want to get them out of the field, sanitation. So management, there is a pre-planned dip that Dr. Edgar discussed in a publication a couple of years ago. So certain fungicides, one we use is Switch, can be used as dips on your transplants to reduce incidence of enthrachnos and gremel before planting. And typically when your transplants come in you mix up the solution of the fungicide and then submerge the transplants in the dip or dip them in the solution for at least two minutes and then plant and that can reduce your initial anoxylamone. If you have problems you want to begin fungicide program early and follow the guidelines and I would follow the guidelines outlined in the Southeast Regional Strawberry IPM Guide 2022. I'm not going to go through all the chemicals because it gets complicated very quickly but websites down in the bottom but if you just go to your Google machine and type in Southeast Strawberry IPM Guide 2022 and it'll take you to that link. And then there's great information I think Ash mentioned on insect control, weed control, variety selection and also on disease control. I think on pages 45 to 50 they outline disease resistance management for both anthrax and botrytis. But it's very complicated and try and explain it in a short webinar would be feasible. Two more diseases I wanted to mention. One is rhizobus frutera. This is one that if you ever left cardinal strawberries in your counter for any length of time or even in the refrigerator this is what you might have seen looks like your strawberries have grown up beard. This is also known as old gray man's beard. We have a white to gray tint to it. Sometimes rhizobus which is a fungal disease is joined by another pathogen named known as mucer. You can find both together or sometimes they can be confused, I confuse them. The blackberries on the right I found those in my refrigerator a couple of weeks ago after a short vacation. So made for a good picture for this seminar. But so rhizobus frutera, it's a fungal pathogen lives on decaying organic matter. The initial affection appears as a discolored water soaked spot on the fruit. Sometime tannish looking and somewhat soft fruit appears to be wounded or where you wound the fruit. That's where this fungus will attack. Under conditions of high relative humidity the berries will become covered with this coat of white mycelium. It's fungal growth that hair you're seeing. And then management is removed plant debris just organic matter, remove ripe berries as soon as possible for harvest. Don't let them sit out in the field and then maybe be gentle when you're picking avoid bruising the fruit which can increase incidence of rhizobus, that wound that you cause. Then rapid post harvest cooling I think Ash mentioned that for insect control as well. Cooling them down, it's not gonna stop the disease but it will slow it down. We don't recommend fungicize for rhizobus. It's mainly a cultural practices that will reduce this problem. Last disease I wanted to talk about is a new disease for Alabama. Neopestilop, neopestiloseops, such a terrible name. But Dr. Connor found this down in Bruton back in, it was March. Visit a grower down here, new grower for the state. This is a disease, it's a fungal disease that was detected in Florida about three years ago. More recently detected in Georgia, also in Michigan, Texas and a few other places but Dr. Connor was able to first find it in Alabama down in South Alabama. And this is the disease that appears to be coming in on transplants. But once it gets into the field, it can survive in the soil, in on debris and be an annual problem and it can be a severe problem. You can see some of the significant least spots on that plant on the left. And then I took the pictures in the center on the right but you can see the least spot there but then going to the fruit. And you get a lesion that looks a little bit like anthracnose fruit rot but it's much, I would say massive comparison to anthracnose. I should have had them side by side for a year but then you get that black fruiting structures growing in that lesion itself. Here's more pictures from what I collected a few weeks ago. So really a nasty disease. So it can cause extreme yield loss and can destroy entire fields that's happened in Florida. You can't spread quickly to other fields or within a field and to other fields nearby. Once it is introduced, rain events definitely aggravated or I should say help it out and spread. It causes a leaf and fruit spot as I showed you initially but eventually it can infect the roots the crowns of plants causing plant death and that's what we're really getting concerned with. So with management you want to limit operations when plants are wet to avoid movement of this disease. If you do see the disease you want to remove those infected plants as soon as possible and wear practical as you can't stop it from spreading and of course you want to get those plants out of the field so it doesn't establish in the soil itself. So there's been work done at Florida where they've had the disease for a few years. They've been doing fungicide trials and I think with one year data they saw that using something like thyram and switch rotated with thyram or thyram captain rind tilt or inspire may reduce instruments on the fruit. So they're still working on this to see how effective these fungicide programs are. Florida's also was evaluating our current varieties that are available for see if any had resistance to the disease and a couple had some, I don't want to say call tolerance but it had appeared to have a slight level of resistance but nothing to write home about. And there are programs now trying to develop resistant varieties to this pathogen though the pathogen so new that these programs are just getting started. As I said, we've found that just in one field in Alabama came in on transplants probably coming from Illinois we believe or the Midwest and it was just on one variety coming from that nursery out of five that the grower planted which was interest. So we recommended in his case to destroy those plants as soon as possible. So with that, I will stop. That is me after a long day of picking diseases with a virgin strawberry daiquiri I believe. But again, my name is Ed Sakura with the Auburn University Cooperative Extension System. You can email me directly at s-i-k-o-r-e-j at Auburn.edu. I'll be happy to talk to you there. And then follow me on Twitter if you're interested in diseases or agriculture in general. I also work with tree fruits, small fruit, vegetables, corn and soybeans. So and hops and hemp in fact. So if you have any interest in those crops and you're on Twitter, please follow me. And then again for disease control you really wanna look at the Southeast guide. Again, the 2022 strawberry IPM guide and look at the disease section, look at the fungicides and look at resistance management. That's all very important. So with that, I'll stop.