Strawberries and Caneberries

Central Coast growers and support staff should be looking to clear their calendars this coming October 8 for a Zoom call sponsored by the California Strawberry Commission and featuring plant pathologists Peter Henry and Akif Eskalen, myself and plant breeder Steve Knapp.

A very special friend of our family celebrated an important birthday this past week, and brought over two of the chocolate covered strawberries she received as a present on this big day.

Here's one for all of you that I just can't figure out. Symptoms (see Photo 1 below) are on fruiting primocane blackberry, under tunnels. Maybe 5% of leaves affected, mostly limited to the bottom third of the hedgerow but issue does occur in bunches.

A number of you may have heard by now about the op ed by Jerry Seinfeld in the New York Times (the "newspaper of record" as it were) as a response to an article saying how NYC will never come back post Covid. He loves New York, and makes a serious case on how it will always rebound.

In case any of you are wondering what the strawberries look like right now with the fires close by (about 30 miles away) burning, I took some pictures of one of the test plots I happened to be harvesting this afternoon. Influence is negligible, a bit of the fruit that can be washed off.