 So that brings us to Jesse Ostrander. He is the director of the Plant Diagnostic Lab in the Department of Plant Pathology. And he's the lead diagnostician and an instructor for the Intro to Plant Path and Diseases of the Landscape course. He has a master's degree. Close it down then. Okay. I'll press it off. I got a quiet someone. He has a master's degree in plant path from Kansas State and has been with NDSU since 2013. And again, please keep your mics muted and I'm gonna turn it over to Jesse. Hey, thank you for that introduction, Julie. And thank you everyone for your interest in grapes in general. As the title suggests, I'm gonna touch on a lot of different things, but this talk is primarily based on a presentation I've given a couple of times for the North Dakota Grape and Wine Association. And it really focuses more so on diseases, but there's some other things mentioned, just to kind of touch on a lot of the big topics of what you're gonna need to know if you decide to grow grapes. So that line for my talk is I'm gonna talk about the big three diseases. Those include black rot, powdery mildew and downy mildew. And if you grow any number of grapes, you're very likely to see potentially all three of those pathogens, especially one or two of them. For each one of those pathogens, I'm gonna talk about the impact they can have on your grape growing, the symptoms that you might see on the plants and some tips to identify which pathogen you might be dealing with. And then I'll go over some integrated pest management talking about both the chemicals, fungicides that you could apply and when and how to apply those, as well as some cultural things that you can do outside of the chemical applications that could help manage those diseases. And then after I talk about those pathogens, I'm going to touch on a few other diseases that are less problematic and also less common. I'll also talk about some common arthropod pests very briefly just to kind of let you know of them and give you some resources for dealing with those beyond myself and also touch on a few other disorders. Then very briefly, I'll talk about some cultivation tips and then I'll answer any questions that you might have. So black rot, it's caused by a fungus and that fungus's scientific name is Quignardia bedwellae. It's favored by warm weather but it's still a threat North Dakota and that's not supposed to be a joke. I do mean that it gets warm enough in the summers of North Dakota that you will see black rot. It often develops in combination with rainfall and that's going to be a very common repeating theme with these three pathogens I'm going to talk about first. They're all heavily dependent on relative humidity and rainfall. And so you can see some infected berries there on the left and then I'll talk more about what we call mummies but some mummy fruit is displayed on the right in those photos. So the impact of black rot is that it can have up to a 100% yield loss. That yield loss is going to be a combination of direct infection of the fruit which again you can see down there on the left as well as just the impact overall on the plant's health as the leaves lose photosynthetic surface area from the infections. And even the canes can develop cankers and in some special cases all of the material up distal from the roots from those infected cankers can become blighted can die due to the damage from the stem. So this is a pathogen that can affect all above ground parts of the vine. It's not going to affect the bark or the old woody tissue but any green stems, leaves, petioles and fruit are susceptible to this pathogen. And it's easily considered the most important disease of North Dakota grapes. And I've gotten many samples of black rot over the years. So I just showed you kind of almost compendia worthy textbook worthy photos with examples of ideal characteristics of infection. This photo is more so just to let you know what you might see if you were walking several feet away from a plant with an infection at many different stages. In the bottom right you can see another leaf that's pretty much photo worthy for a compendia but more towards the bottom left we have some lesions that are less developed and kind of in the middle there you have some leaves that have several lesions of coalesce and so they have more of a scorched appearance. You can also see some of the berries are just brown and maybe from this distance we wouldn't know necessarily what's wrong with them. We'd have to take a closer look. So if you're trying to identify which pathogen you have black rot is somewhat easy to identify. It has wonderfully characteristic lesions that are when I talked to intro to plant pathology one of the earlier labs we have are general characteristics of fungi versus bacteria. And this pathogen really produces ideal lesions or lesions highly characteristic I should say of a fungal pathogen. They have a light colored brown center, a dark border. They're well-defined. You can definitely easily distinguish where the lesion starts and stops. And with this pathogen in particular if you look at the lesions closely you can see a ring of little black spots and those little black spots are fruiting bodies of the pathogen. And I'll show you a cross section of what those look like when we go over the disease life cycle in just a moment. On the fruit it's pretty easy to notice it on the green berries if you get close. The infection starts off as a small white dot which then has kind of a bull's eye appearance with a lighter brown ring around that white dot. And then the berry will turn brown. As the entire berry becomes infected they will shrivel up kind of dry out and they become what's called mummies. There are some pathogens that can look similar especially on the fruit to black rot. I'm not gonna get heavily into these pathogens right now but two of them are batritis which are shown up at the top. So you can see the fruit will get a darkened and shriveled appearance similar to black rot. And also anthracnose will cause the fruit to turn darker in color. Batritis, I could tell the difference between batritis and black rot right away because you might notice on the far right there it's not the highest resolution image but the pathogen is producing some spores that make the fruit look fuzzy. And so black rot does not produce a fuzzy appearance on the fruit. Anthracnose has a reddish coloration to it also that you will not see with black rot. So we look at the life cycle of black rot. I wanna start in the upper left where you can see that mummified fruit containing fruiting bodies. And so that mummified fruit is very important because that's how the pathogen survives the winter and it's the source of the infection for the next year. At least the source in your own growing conditions. So if we look really closely that at a cross-section of that mummified fruit we can see these little cavities called perithesia. And within that those cavities, they're sacs filled with spores. And so those spores when they're released in the spring they're what we call the primary inoculum or the first source of disease. And so those are going to infect the leaves and then the leaf tissue. I'm sorry about that. The leaf tissue is going to produce different type of fruiting body called a pycnidium. And so once those pycnidium are producing canidia we can see there's a circular life cycle there. It doesn't look much like a circle in this picture but the canidia are produced on leaves they can infect new leaves or fruit. In turn those are going to produce more pycnidia with more spores to infect more leaves and more fruit. So that's where the damage really takes place but we're not able to prevent that cycle if we don't get rid of those mummified fruit. To some degree even if you were to remove all sources of primary inoculum there's still a chance that those canidia could blow in from a neighboring vineyard or a neighbor's grapevine. However that infection would take place later in the season and your plants would be more robust and better able to handle that later introduction of the pathogen as opposed to if you have a large number of mummies in your own growing conditions. So for cultural management you're going to clean up those mummies as best you can that's absolutely vital to lower the disease pressure. If you do see block rot in the growing season try and remove the infected portions of the plant. You'll prevent all of those canidia from being released. And if you prune the plant properly you can open it up and promote good air flow. That's going to reduce the microclimate of humidity inside of the vine and lessen the ability of the fungus to continue to develop. Regarding chemical control there is a critical time that you need to try and to protect those plants. You're going to protect young fruit from pre bloom until about four weeks post bloom. Of course that time is going to be a little bit different every year so you're just going to have to get out there and know at what stage your plants are at to know when to apply fungicides. Unfortunately organic products such as copper and sulfur are not very effective for this pathogen. And the reason for that is that they just don't persist on the surface of the leaf and they don't enter the plant. So they're not, the fungus most of it is down inside of the plant and then new infections are constantly occurring new spores are constantly landing everywhere on the plant. So even if you were to spray a copper solution on the plant it's going to get washed off very quickly. It's not going to remain there and be effective. So you don't need to write any of this down or try to remember this table. This table was taken from a guide that I'm going to share with you a link to this. It's called the Midwest Fruit and Pest Management Guide. It's released from Purdue but it's a collaboration of, oh I wanna say 10 or more different universities, land grant universities in the Midwest. And it has these chemicals and more listed in there. I did list these chemicals because all of these have no documented cases of resistance occurring. So they're all highly effective. And mancazeb up there that starred is the recommended protectant, whereas captain. So there's two protectants on here. Protectants just remain on the surface of a plant. They don't enter into the plant's tissues. So they're really a preventive spray. So you could start out the season with a preventive spray and then later in the season if you do see any disease, you'd have to switch to a systemic because they enter the plant's tissues and then can actually interact with the existing fungus. But mancazeb is the recommended protectant. It's more effective than captain, although both are listed as options. So when you're applying protectants, you need to apply those every seven to 10 days. You're gonna aim more for seven if it's especially hot or wet. 10 days under ideal conditions because even these protectants can eventually be washed off of the plants. And as the plant continues growing, the new tissue will not have any protectants on it, whereas systemics will move through the water, the vascular tissues, and they will move into the new tissues to some degree. Your best bet for controlling this disease is combining those cultural practices of removing mummies and opening up the plant with proper pruning along with chemical. And then when you do the chemical, you're gonna wanna incorporate both a systemic and a protectant fungicide to get adequate control. Also, rotating modes of action for the systemics. All your systemic, there's an organization called FRAC, the Fungicide Resistance Action Committee and they have assigned a mode of action group to every systemic fungicide. That'll be listed on that fungicide. And you're going to want to rotate into different modes of action. Even if a fungicide has a different name, you could have two fungicides with different active ingredients that target the same site in a cell. And so what the FRAC action groups are separating fungicides out by which target site in a cell they're actually acting on. And that's what we actually need to be rotating is which target site and cell is, what is the target? Because if the fungus was to have a mutation and have a different express target site, then all of those products aimed at that target site would no longer be as effective. So that's it for BlackRaw. I do wanna touch on that since I've already mentioned this. There's not really an ideal place to talk about this, but when I did talk to the North Dakota Wine and Grape Association, I brought this up and I asked them because I help a lot of different commodity groups with disease management issues. And one of the things that people have complained about is especially if you're doing professional pesticide applications, a lot of these products, it's not like a little bottle that you're gonna find at Home Depot. They're gonna be big jugs that can do sometimes many thousands of acres and they're expensive. And so what people tend to want to do is they might buy a case of Metconazole or a fungicide with Metconazole as an active ingredient and they wanna use that up because it's not realistic that they're going to rotate and use one thousand of that jug twice a year, right? If they're rotating to all these different fungicides. So to make it more economically friendly, one thing that if you really get into grape growing, you could do is maybe start a Facebook group and as part of that social interaction, you could share your different fungicides. So one person could buy one mode of action and another person could buy a different one and you guys could exchange those. It is something that that association, I believe they have done. I know other groups have done that in the past. So if your actual area that needs treated is pretty small. So that's it for black rot. If you can think of any good questions, I'll be happy to answer those at the end. Moving on to powdery mildew. Powdery mildew is caused by apungus as well. Erisiphynecator. It really needs the relative humidity to be pretty high, even just to keep its activity going, not just for infection, but for actually maintaining bioactive. And that's because the phthalus or the body of the fungus is outside of the plant's host tissue. And that's actually why rainfall can be detrimental as well. The physical, the rain physically hitting the phthalus of the fungus can actually damage it. Powdery mildew can result in a yield loss of up to 100%. It's not going to really ever kill your plant. Powdery mildew can be a stress and added level of stress that combined with other things, like poor fertility, inadequate water, detrimental weather conditions could overall kill a plant. But powdery mildew alone is not going to kill a grape plant or really any other plant. Powdery mildew is what we call an obligate parasite. It cannot live off of a host, a living host. And because of that, it's very good at keeping that host alive. But it does result in yield loss because it will directly colonize berries. And when it does so, well, first of all, I don't know about you, but I don't want to eat a berry covered with powdery mildew. But also it does a lot of mechanical damage by the way that it feeds on the berries. It's puncturing it, it's covering it with holes to basically put the fungal equivalent of roots, feeding roots into that berry. And that's going to result in the berry shriveling up. So it can affect any green tissue and the fruit. It's a very common pathogen. And you probably see, you know, you have any level of active gardening. You probably see powdery mildew, it affects many trees, turf, peonies are always getting covered with powdery mildew, especially if they're in the shade part of the day. I know begonias have a huge problem with this. And all of those plants that species of powdery mildew is specific to that plant. So the species of powdery mildew you're gonna see on your grapes will not affect the other plants in your yards. You can actually manage powdery mildew on grapes just by spraying the grape plants. You don't need to spray any other plant in your yard or in the vicinity that might have powdery mildew. It does originally colonize a lower leaf surface, but then it will move to the upper leaf surface where it's going to sporulate. It has an optimal range from 70 degrees to 86 degrees Fahrenheit, but the fungus can actually infect and it will have some activity as long as it's warmer than 50 degrees Fahrenheit. So here's a photo showing early infection. And in this particular case, we do see some of that characteristic powdery growth there. Imagine if that weren't there if you just saw those chlorotic spots, that's really what you're looking for is the first signs of infection potentially. And then later, those infection spots will result in that growth on the upper surface belief. And as I had mentioned, it can infect the berries as well. Obviously it's doing a much better job of keeping that tissue alive compared to black rot, but you're not gonna wanna eat that and after a few days, those berries are gonna start to shrivel. As that fungus pulls nutrients and water out of those berries to keep itself alive. So what are you actually seeing when you see that white powdery growth? As I mentioned, the fungus is almost entirely external and what you're seeing of that white coloring is mostly due to sporulation and somewhat to hyphae. So if we look at this textbook photo here at the bottom, there's really three different things that we're gonna be able to see on the plant that are showcased here. One is just the general mycelia, that's all the network of threads along the bottom of the photo. The other that you're gonna see most of the year are these both clear and darkened spike-like structures. Those are the spores, the primary method that the fungus spreads throughout the year called canidia. And then we have those meatball-looking structures and those are the overwintering structures. And if you do look closely at powdery mildew infected tissue, you can see, those are called clistothesia, you can see some clistothesia, but those are gonna occur later in summer or early fall. And so here's actually a photo of a leaf with clistothesia. And you can see some of them almost look white and then as they start to mature, they'll turn kind of a light brown and then finally they're a dark brown. That dark color protects the spores from UV light and just kind of a, I'm a bit of a micro-biology nerd here. I get excited about fungal identification. As a cool activity, you can look at each one of those clistothesia. You might notice the spikes coming off of them. They always make me think of the old navel mines that are floating just below the surface of the water by looking at the ornamentation at the end of those spikes and also cracking open one of the clistothesia and counting the spores inside of them. You can identify the powdery mildew to genus. Of course, you don't really need to do that if you know which plant it's on since they're all so highly host-specific, but it's still a fun exercise and easy introductory level taxonomy. So if we look at the life cycle of powdery mildew, we're gonna kind of start with that meatball-like clistothesium at the top there. So those are gonna crack open the next spring and they're gonna release spores. And those spores are gonna be able to colonize the surface of leaves. And when you look at that photo of the spore colonizing the leaf, you'll notice most of it stays up top, but there's that little indentation into the plant cell. So that's called a feeding structure called a haestorium and basically acts as like a plant's root does. It's just gonna pull water and nutrients out of that plant cell, similar to how a plant root does that to soil. They're gonna put many thousands of those into each plant cell, though. And so that fungus will then grow in biomass. It can directly infect grape clusters, which are gonna produce more clistothesia and then I'm sorry, more canidia. And also there will be more canidia formed on leaf surfaces. And then at the end of the year, the fungus is going into the growing season. The fungus is going to survive by way of producing new clistothesia on infected leaf tissue. And it can also survive in dormant buds. The following season, if you follow the outermost pathway at the top, now the following season, in addition to those clistothesia releasing spores, you'll also see as that dormant bud germinates, it'll give rise to a young shoot that will be completely covered by the fungus, which is kind of cool looking from a pathology standpoint, but really bad news for that plant. That's a ton of new inoculum. So if you see anything like that, you're going to want to remove it from the vine. So regarding management, all cultivars are susceptible, but properly pruning and training the vine is gonna help open it up and reduce that humidity that the fungus needs. Because again, it's almost entirely outside of the plant. So it's fairly susceptible to dehydration, the drying out in low humidity environments. So removing the leaves around berry clusters immediately after fruit sets gonna help open up those berry clusters and reduce the microclimate that will allow that fungus to develop. And if you do decide to apply fungicides, you're gonna want to do so when temperatures are above 50 degrees Fahrenheit. So recall, even though it has an optimal temperature of 70 to 86 degrees Fahrenheit, it does have some level of activity at 50 degrees or warmer. And so that fruit is highly susceptible for one month after bloom, after which as the fruit continues to mature, it becomes less susceptible. And even if the fruit isn't directly infected, just the nutrients being sapped from the leaves and of the plant are going to, could actually I should say, could stress the plant and reduce the quality of the fruit. So it's not just about direct infection, but of course direct infection is going to be especially detrimental. Again, there's a list of products here that you don't necessarily need to write down or try to remember because they're all going to be available for you in the Midwest fruit management guide. But I did want to just touch on the fact that in this particular case, sulfur and potassium salts are actually listed as effective. And that's because that sulfur is going to be able to come in direct contact with that fungal tissue and kill it because it's on the outside of the leaf. However, with the sulfur, you're going to want to be careful, even if you've applied sulfur in the past, if you get a product in a new formulation, the application rates can change drastically. And sulfur can be quite damaging to plant tissue as well. So young leaves that haven't developed a good cuticle could be quite damaged by sulfur. Or if you put it on at too strong of a rate, you could damage a leaf at any level of maturity. And potassium salts, they can knock back infections, but they do absolutely nothing to prevent an infection in the first place. And remember, the spores are actually infecting from the underside of the leaf, which is going to be quite difficult to cover with a topical. So those systemics that are listed in there are going to help prevent infections as well as kickback existing. But that being said, I'm all for promoting things that are more natural if they're effective, but we need to make sure that they're effective. So in this case, sulfur and potassium salts are. So this is basically what I just talked about. You can have a dry flowable, a flowable, a wettable powder or a dust. That's what the DFWP and D stand for. You're going to have drastic different rates of application for each one of those formulations. So you're really going to want to read the label closely. If you've had experience with dust in the past and then you find a wettable powder, don't presume that it's the same rates there. You could damage your plant or waste your time if you put it on to, like at not a high enough rate. And as I mentioned, the potassium salts will kick back in the existing colony if they don't prevent establishment and they don't work for other pathogens either. So if you do happen to have powder, mildew and black rot, for example, it'd be really in your best interest to find something that could be effective with both of those pathogens rather than do something like potassium salts which would not do anything to help manage black rot. So again, that's it for powdery mildew. Downy mildew. This is the coolest looking pathogen that there is in the field of plant pathology. It's kind of beautiful, although obviously it's not something you want to see if you're trying to get a good grape harvest. It's caused by an olmycete, which is a fungal-like organism that does have some biochemical differences. We'll touch on when we talk about management that are important. And it's scientific name is plasma para viticola. And it's favored by, not surprisingly, warm and humid weather. Downy mildew can affect all green parts of a vine and the potential exists for complete defoliation on susceptible cultivars. It's really more of the plant's fault. Downy mildew is an obligate parasite, similar to powdery mildew. But when a plant can sense that a leaf is infected, it will drop that leaf. Infections start off as kind of a general, somewhat confused but circular bruised looking area that's chlorotic. And that's what's shown on the left side. And then as the infection progresses, those infected areas will turn more necrotic and they'll become harshly angular. If we look at the underside of a leaf, that's where you're going to see the pathogen, sporulating. And sometimes people confuse this with powdery mildew, understandably. It's usually a bit more circular, though. And it's also going to primarily be on the underside of the leaf, as opposed to the top of the leaf. It can affect berries as well. And as plants mature, which as berries mature, I should say, if you look at that lower left photo, you can see the pathogen, well, maybe you don't see it doing this, but what it's doing, if you follow it from the berry cluster back to that larger pedicle, it's actually traveling. The pathogen is spreading mechanically down that tissue. And so as the berries mature, they become less susceptible to infection by spores, but at all growth stages, they are susceptible to direct infection through the pathogens migrating through new tissue in the plant. And so when the berries do become infected, it's obviously bad news there. They're very small in size and eventually they will become brown and die. So here again is just a better example of the damage that you can see from infected berry clusters. So obviously that's going to really impact your harvest. So the white that you're seeing is actually that the fruiting body is a plasma para. They're called sporangia floors. That's what the whole tree-like structure is called. And those little round clusters at the ends are called sporangia. So this pathogen requires wet weather because those sporangia are actually filled with animal-like little spores that can swim through water. So they don't move in the wind like other fungi do. Primarily they swim in waters, but they can explode very quickly if it gets wet. They are highly prolific in the amount of spores that they make. So if you have a heavy rain event, you can go from a small amount of infection and then boom, you can just see it everywhere. It does survive the winter and fallen infected leaf tissue. And the infection will begin when shoots are about eight inches long. So you're going to want to apply any protectant from just sides or oh, my sides shortly before that. Again, temperature is around 50 degrees. And as I mentioned, with it being able to expand the level of disease quite quickly, it can infect a new part of a plant or a new plant and then produce spores to infect, continue that infection as little as five days. So here's the life cycle of downy mildew. And if we want to start in the upper left where we see a cross-section of a leaf, it produces an overwintering structure called an OSPOR. And that OSPOR actually, similar to the fungus, fungus is repeating cycle, will produce a spranjum, which will then open up and release those little weird-looking spores there, but those little leg-like structures coming off of them are actually flagella that allow them to swim in water. And so from there, they will just infect leaf and berries. And if you look at one of those close-ups of infected leaf or berry, you'll see out of the stomata, so the pores for gas exchange in the leaves, the fungus will produce that spranjum, or the spranjia four with several spranjia. And also it's a good opportunity to showcase the differences here. Behind that spranjum is inside the host tissue. You can see the discoloration representing the body of the omacoda. So if you were to apply something like a sulfur for this pathogen, it wouldn't come into contact with the fungus without killing the plant as well, since the fungus is up inside of the plant tissue. So what can you do? Well, again, for all three of these pathogens, it becomes rather repetitive, but it is important properly selecting a site with good airflow and then training the vine correctly and selectively pruning the canopy to open it up is gonna do a lot of good. Mulching around the plant is a new one though. The mulch actually will help in heavy rainstorms. The mulch will stop as much water from directly hitting the soil and bouncing up on the plant, which can actually spread spores, especially from any O spores that have persisted in the soil from previous year's infections. They can produce sporangia, which will then splash up onto the plant. But if you put down mulch, it'll act as a barrier for that. You're gonna wanna eliminate suckers and other green foliage at the ground level, similarly because those low lying tissues are gonna be an easy way for Downey Mildred to become established. And then destroy any nearby secondary hosts. So this would be like volunteers and things like that. And then just cleaning up debris will help prevent as many O spores from becoming persistent in the environment. I confess, I don't know specifically for Downey Mildred, but in general and other O mycota, those O spores can persist up past 20 years. So once you have this pathogen producing those overwintering spores, it's gonna be something that you have to think about managing pretty much indefinitely at that point. But cleaning up those debris is and preventing those O spores from becoming incorporated with the soil environment is gonna go a long way to alleviating disease pressure. And so all of these are practical in aiding the reduction of infection or disease pressure, but fungicides are still gonna be recommended. Again, you don't have to remember this, but I do have it mostly as a talking point to remind myself there are several products that will effectively manage Downey Mildred, but do not have good efficacy against fungi and vice versa. So the primary way that O mycota differ from fungi is they have different fats and a whole different enzyme pathway to create those cell wall, I'm sorry, so they have different fats and different sterols. Like we have cholesterol, plants have sterols too, right? They have different sterols in their cell wall and a lot of fungicides actually attack the enzyme pathway that creates those sterols and those won't work on O mycota. But there are some products that are specific to O mycota that work on them and do not work on fungi. So just keep that in mind, if you do ever have to manage both a fungal pathogen and O myc, O myc, because you will not necessarily have overlap in all of the different products available to you. Just gonna mention real quick, butridus. The tritus is a terrible problem in greenhouses and anywhere where it remains wet and grape clusters are another place where vitritus really thrives. And you can again see a slightly better resolution photo here. You can kind of see that fuzzy, gritty collection of spores that are really characteristic of vitritus. Vitritus can over winter and infected debris on the ground or in the vine. Unlike the other pathogens we've talked about, vitritus is what we call a sapropite where it likes to infect and feed off of dead tissue. And so it's not, it's more of an opportunistic pathogen. It won't directly infect the healthy host, but if the host becomes damaged or the tissues are senescing, so if there's wounds from bird activity or hail or even an infection star from a powdery nildo infection, the tritus can take advantage of that and infect the plant. I do apologize, I'm kind of losing my voice. All right, and it's optimum tip sure is a little bit on the warmer side, I suppose, from 60 to 80 degrees with moisture. So there again is a somewhat blurry, but close up of a berry with vitritus. So, without those spores being present, that could be black rot, but when you see that grayish brown, fuzzy spoilation that tips you off, this is actually vitritus that you're dealing with. And here again, with the lighting there, it looks a little white. So you might think, oh, that could be powdery nildo or downy nildo, but especially in the bottom right there, we can see how brown that is. And of course, for me, you can do a microscopic slide of that and those spores are quite different in their morphology compared to downy nildo or powdery nildo. So vitritus is really going to, again, it's gonna really need that relative humidity so you can remove the leaves around clusters. Something I should point out though is when you're opening up those grape clusters, you do wanna also keep in mind the potential for sunscald. You don't wanna open them up so much that they burn up in the sun. So there's kind of a happy median there. You can use fungicides if you've had a history of the disease. You wanna buy those at Bloom. And again, I think that's a typo there. Again, before harvest. And so there's some listed there that are available and effective, but again, both the timing of the spray and the products are all in that management guide. I do wanna say one other thing about vitritus that I didn't have explicitly stated here. So the best way if you ever have vitritus, the best thing you can do is just harvest your grapes in a timely manner. If the grapes are ripe and sitting on the vine, that is ideal for vitritus. But if you just harvest your fruit when it's ready to be harvested, that's gonna go a long way, most of the way to managing vitritus infection. Okay, so I don't wanna spend a lot of time on this, but because I have talked about situations where you might wanna apply undersize, I have to do my due diligence extension, a specialist and just mention some best practices when you're going to spray. So again, always mix the product and spray according to the label use protective, correct protective, personal protective equipment, which will differ based on the formulation of the product. Don't randomly mix fungicides unless they're specifically listed as compatible, they could precipitate out, which could cause them to be completely ineffective or you could get phytotoxicity if the solvents and adjuvants are not going to play nice with the plant. The mixture of those together could strip the cuticle and cause a lot of injury to the plant. Not necessarily the active ingredient, but the other things that are in there. Also more is not better and pick the right time of the day. I apologize if you've taken the training with Andrew Thornston, but the temperature, if it's too hot, because you'll know all of this is why I'm apologizing, but if it's too hot, those adjuvants can damage the plant even if they are listed as safe for the plant. If it's really windy, your fungicide might not be getting where it needs to go. You never want to apply fungicides right before it rains because they could be washed off where they have a chance to get into the plant's tissues or set. Even the protectants that don't go into plant tissues do kind of cure, kind of think of it like a paint. Your paint, you don't want to paint right before it rains. You also want to apply fungicides. And then the stage of plant growth and where you're at with the disease. If you already have a lot of disease pressure, you're not going to want to apply a protectant, for example, because it's not going to do much for you. So this is that fabled Midwest Fruit Pest Management Guide that I've been mentioning. This is the current episode, 2019 to 2020. Here's a link where it is available. Since the talk is available for you online, you now have access to that link. You could also just do a quick search per do Midwest Fruit Guide and you'll find it right away. Just quickly going to mention viruses, mostly just so you're aware of, hey, could this be a virus? Viruses are a lot trickier to manage and even to diagnose because they're sub microscopic. But there are several viruses that can affect grapevines, including tobacco ring spot, tomato ring spot, grape leaf row virus, and several others. Unfortunately, viruses can be highly variable. They will express themselves differently based on the overall health of the plant and also cultivar interactions with if the genetic differences of the cultivar could impact the expression of the virus. Also just depending on the overall health of the plant, they could be latent or symptomless. But oftentimes overall, the plant's going to be stunted, it's going to have reduced vigor, which is going to lead to poor fruit quality. And then if the virus does express itself beyond just the stunting and reduced vigor, it often has discoloration or distortion and foliage that could be confused with a nutrient disorder or a herbicide drift. So here we have grape family virus and you can see the vein banding, which is also associated with several nutrient disorders. So what can you do to prevent a virus? Because really what we're trying to do with viruses is just prevent them. Once you have a virus, I'm just going to probably think about removing that plant and replacing it as opposed to treating it with fungicides as is an option for those other diseases I talked about. So high quality planting stocks should have had a virus indexing program where they certified it as virus free. So that'll go a long way. Don't introduce the virus with your purchase, right? Likewise, not propagating new plant tissue yourself or using stock from a friend or another grower that we don't know much about. The history of that plant is going to help prevent viruses. Testing is available, I can test for viruses, but we have to use either a protein or a nucleic acid based test. You can't just pop it out of the microscope like a fungus. I have to buy third party vendors supplies to do that. I do have to charge for that test. So it can be pretty expensive, especially if you're just doing it for one single plant and getting to the hundreds of dollars quite easily. I mean, if we're lucky and it's the first virus we test for, most people would probably be okay paying for that, but sometimes you have to test it for 10 or 12 viruses to narrow down what you're working with and nobody usually wants to spend that much money. And then there's no realistic cure or treatment either, but the reasons you might think about testing are, well, it's always nice to know if you do have a virus or not. And while negative data can't ever prove that you don't have a virus, it can certainly support that you don't. And also different viruses have different methods of transmission. So it could shed some light into maybe some things that you're doing or some arthropod tests you might need to manage as many viruses are vectored by different insects to help alleviate that virus and prevent it in your vineyard in the future. And then there's lots of issues that you might see on grapes that aren't going to be related to a passion of any kind. So obviously herbicide injury, here we have a picture of a grape that's expressing symptoms of coming to contact with a growth regulator herbicide, phenoxy, causes those fingerings, other growth regulator herbicides like 2-4-D will cause the leaf to pucker and the petiole to twist and the dicamba just causes crazy amounts of puckering. That's usually what you'll see on grapes, maybe some roundup here and there too, unless you're right next to an agricultural field and then they spray all kinds of things that it can get a lot more complicated. So I just want to touch real quick on arthropod pests. I am not an entomologist. I do have an entomologist that works in the lab though and he would just be absolutely thrilled to help you if you ever had an entomologically related problem on your grape or any other plant or even if you just need help identifying an insect that you find in your home. I asked him, what are the big things, the big entomologically related problems that they should know about before growing grapes and this is the short list that he gave me. I will show a photo of the gall midges but not until later when I confirmed the phyloxera and I also do not talk about spotted winged russophila because Esther McGinnis and Jan Kanotl have a lot of programming out there about spotted winged russophila. Again, Alex who works in my lab can identify spotted winged russophila for you and he would be happy to answer any questions but also you could, there's several fact sheets and I would imagine recorded podcasts and other sources for russophila. Likewise with Japanese beetles, the one thing I am gonna share with you with Japanese beetles is the latest trapping results. The North Dakota Department of Ag does partner with the Animal Plant Health Inspection Service to, with the USDA to trap each year since Japanese beetle was first detected, I think in 2016 or maybe 15, not sure. All, every county had at least one trap and see poor little dung, oh, I'm sorry. I guess Billing, Slope, and Bowman and Golden Valley did not have any. Okay, well most counties had at least one trap but only the ones that are dark blue had any positives and then even out of that they could have had a shading if they wanted to a shading scale but they chose not to but CAS, for example, had 42 of the 85 traps come up positive for Japanese beetle whereas Burley only had eight out of 65. They're looking at 50% roughly of the traps being positive in CAS and about one-eighth of the traps being positive in Burley. So there are differences in scale maybe of the infection rates. The idea is though if you're in one of these counties or a neighboring county you could see Japanese beetle. If you don't know much about Japanese beetle the danger will come from the fact that the adults are voracious feeders. They will feed on just about everything not just your grape plants but they will feed on grape plants as well. Potato leaf hoppers are really cool. I've had a number of samples come in where the submitter thought that there was some kind of herbicide injury. You can see right most photo there shows puckering and distorted foliage almost like a Dicamba or 2-4-D combination. And then we see these necrotic margins. If you look at the underside of the leaf on those necrotic margins you'll see our little friends there on the left. So you can see both a nymph and an adult of the potato leaf hopper. And so as they feed on the plant tissue with their piercing sucking mouth parts they inject some of their saliva in there and it has a protein that for whatever reason causes the plants to distort as though they've been exposed to a growth regulator as well as turn necrotic. And they're somewhat easy to see you can probably see them with a hand lens if you just look on the underside of the leaves and then if you see those then you can say, oh, okay, that's almost certainly what's going on. Phyloxera is again, I'm no expert to this but what I was told I shouldn't share with you is that European rootstocks are going to die if they get these eight of like features but on the plus side nobody really uses European rootstock anymore, especially up here where most of the releases are fairly new to focus on cold hardiness. So for management, there are resistant cultivars available and you can remove gulf tissues as those gals that's where the insect goes to lay eggs where it can lay, if I recall right 400 to 600 eggs in each gulf but it's gonna be impossible to eradicate even if you were to remove all of the gulf tissue on your plant because some number of them always remain down in the roots which can lower the end season pressure on a plant. And so there's a source here for Phyloxera that I listed through Oregon State. It was overwhelming for me as someone who's not an entomologist. I certainly didn't wanna read that much but if I was gonna grow grapes and had any issues with Phyloxera, I would read it because it was about 15 to 20 pages long, very thorough, very in-depth, just absolutely great resource for information on that. And on the leaves, as I mentioned with the gall midges there are lots of different gall midges and even other insects that can cause gals on grapes but Phyloxera is somewhat unique. It'll cause that chlorosis on the top of the leaf as well and then its gall is just highly characteristic. It's very spiny, lots of ornamentation. So if we look closely at Phyloxera there on the left versus two other types of galls on the right. Sure, there are other things that can cause galls but they don't look anything like Phyloxera. There are a couple of non-Phyloxera gall making insects that can create galls that will form directly on the fruit even. But if it's not for table grapes you can actually still use that fruit and the gals on the leaf tissue are really just ornamental. They don't result in a lower quality fruit. They don't kill the leaves, they're just kind of there. So no controls are recommended for the non-Phyloxera gall making insects. Very, very briefly I'm gonna talk about Cold Bar Selection Guide because this information and much more is in that link which I suspect is the same link that Julie Robinson mentioned before I started my talk. But when you do choose grapes there's three different varieties or well three different types I should say of grapes. If you're growing them for juicing and you can make jellies and jams out of the juice if you're growing them for table grapes or that just means you're eating the fruit, right? That's what we buy at the store in the produce section or table grapes or if you're growing them for purposes of wine. And then in general it's easiest to grow the juice grapes and the wine grapes are the most typical mostly because any slight differences in cultivation like soil type, soil fertility, water stress that's gonna drastically change the flavor of that wine which if you enjoy wine you know that's why. Certain years are so sought after and others are quite cheap. When you're looking at site selection or you're thinking about starting a vineyard in general you plant your dormant root stock at the end of May. But the site selection and microclimate of where you're playing that root stock is very important. I'll touch on that very briefly at the next slide. Once you plant that root stock in May you should see some green material being produced as early as June. And you're gonna space those in rows. The rows are gonna be eight foot apart from each other and the plants are gonna be six foot apart inside of the rows. The rows ideally should be oriented north to south and then you're gonna wanna put down some mulch and weed control within one and a half foot on each side of the plant or a three foot diameter circle. Could go farther if you want but that's the minimum recommended. Then you will wanna think about constructing a trellis for the vine to train up on July or later that same year. You don't wanna do any pruning of the plant until the next year and you won't get a harvest until the earliest the third year. For your site selection it helps if and Grant Fargo is flattered in a pancake, right? But there are hills and other places in North Dakota. So ideally your vineyard would be on a slope. That slope will allow colder air to drain off and away from the site. So on the left hand side where those green stakes are that's supposed to represent your vineyard and that's what you want ideally on the right hand side. The vineyard is on a slope but that wind break is actually gonna trap that cold air. So it just indicates how ideally you'd have that air being unimpeded in its flow to the lower portion of the valley. So that was a whole lot of topics very minimally touched on some of them. There are a lot of different resources out there for you if you do decide to grow grapes. We do have a state extension specialist who is a high value crop specialist. I'm sorry, she's not with extended but she is a high value crop specialist, Carleen Hadermann-Falenty and Plant Sciences. And she's an excellent resource if you have any questions about cultivar selection or tips on how to grow. And she has a lot of talks that she gives and if you think you have an issue with any kind of a pathogen or nutrient disorder or anything like that I'm a great resource for you. So I, again, work in the Plant Diagnostic Lab that link us to our staff page. It has our contact information where you'll find of course myself, Jesse Ostander as well as my assistant, Presley Mosher. We can help you out with plant pathogens and other plant disorders. And then again, Alexander Knudsen, he is the entomologist and he also works under Jan Kanotl with regards to his entomological specialty. That Midwest Fruit Pest Management Guide is gonna be awesome on information related to fungicide applications and other chemical applications. And if you really get into growing grapes, I would recommend you get the Grape Compendia, the American Phytopathological Society has Compendia for just about everything from wheat to potatoes to grapes to cherries to curbits. But the grape one is gonna be, it's gonna be costly. Last I checked, they were like $190 but it's incredibly thorough. Beautiful pictures and it covers everything from basic, you know, the basics that I kind of already touched on as far as what to expect with regards to cultivation but it'll also go into all the different pathogens from fungi, bacteria, viruses, nematodes. It'll talk about herbicide injury. It'll talk about all the entomological pests of economic concern and it will also touch on nutrient disorders. So it's an incredible resource that you would most likely use several times a year for many decades if you were to invest in it. So with that, I'll be happy to try and answer your questions. And if I remember right, Julie, you were playing on reading back to me because I didn't monitor that at all. I will be reading them back. And first I wanna thank you for giving us this very informative webinar and thank all of you for joining. So you have four questions. What if you want to do totally organic growing and you don't wanna use any chemicals at all? So that may or may not be realistic. You can always aim for that. If you do aim for that, like I had mentioned for insect pests there, you would then wanna use organic products that wouldn't violate the organic certification like mineral oils or things like that. Certainly for powdery mildew. I'm not an expert offhand at what is available and what isn't available for organic. I do believe that the sulfur and potassium salt don't violate that. But at the end of the day, black rats killing your plant, you're gonna have to use an organic inorganic or you're gonna have to do something else like start a new site or something along those lines. And that's why organic produce costs more. It is not always successful and it takes a lot more input. You might have to be out there several times a day removing material that could act as a source for Canida. And then you might still be able to get some harvestable fruit, but certainly the inputs go way up and your resources are limited. Okay, your next question. This comes from Diane, who says her husband is Lebanese and he loves eating rolled grape leaves stuffed with ground meat. Are there any varieties of grapes that have bigger leaves? Oh, I do not know that question. I would ask Harleen that and I'd be happy to get you her contact information if you need help with that. You can just see about me and I'll get you in touch with her. All right, when is the best time to prune? So basically the pruning is going to occur. So with a lot of tree woody species, it's best to prune when the plant is dormant to prevent secondary infections, but with grapes. If you're gonna prune to prevent these diseases, that's just gonna be an activity that is ongoing as you see problem areas where fully it just denser than it should be. And that density is, you're just gonna develop a comfort level with that over time, but the idea is, obviously you want the vine to have enough leaves on it that it can adequately photosynthesize, but you also don't want it to be too closed off the air can't move through it. So you're gonna wanna open it up a little bit so you can kind of see within it, but not necessarily that it looks fair. I don't know how to describe it better than that. All right, and then Jennifer makes a comment. You can all read if you're looking at the chat box. She planted grapes for the first time and she found King of the North, Valiant, Beta, Bluebell, Swenson, Seedless all working well. So just a tip from Jennifer in East Grand Forks. And finally, Nikki says we have three varieties of grapes. We don't know which of them, what they are, since we just bought our property. Some of them are red, some blue colored, and some green. Any ideas? And she lives in Central North Dakota. Yeah, that would be tough. I would again suggest you ask Arlene, but I don't wanna set your expectations too high. That's pretty difficult to identify a variety if you have no background information on it. And I get that request with potatoes, for example, and there's one lab in the United States that can test unknown potato varieties. So I would imagine the level of difficulty would be similar if not worse on grapes since the overall commodity is less than in terms of economic dollars than potatoes. So yeah, I would ask Arlene, there might be some characteristics where she could at least let you know what type of grape it is, table versus juice versus wine. But yeah, that would be very difficult. And with that, I will draw us to a close. And I wanna thank Jesse again for sharing his knowledge with us and all of you for participating. And we hope that you look at the archive webinars if you missed any of them. Last week, Janet Kanoto, who was mentioned today, did a beautiful job on one about butterfly gardening. So brighten your day if you wanna watch that and then join us next week about pollinators and the following week on coronavirus with me and food safety. So thank you again and thanks, Jesse, and I will stop the recording.