This weeks message will cover:

• Can the weather get any worse?

• More on late blight

• Corn borer

• Corn earworm

• Set up your fall armyworm traps

• Pepper maggot traps

Can the weather get any worse?
Tornadoes in Wethersfield, hail in East Hartford and Southington, floods in many different towns...  I drove through Wethersfield yesterday and it was a mess, the crops on one of the large vegetable farms there were shredded from the wind and hail all through town, right down to the river.  The grower I'm working with in East Hartford also had his crops completely shredded and flattened by hail.  The Ellington area has been underwater from heavy storms the last two nights, and the southeast corner was way underwater.  Can you believe this is July!   

More on late blight
When it comes to tomatoes and potatoes production, this may be the toughest year the Northeast has ever seen.  After I finished recording the pest message last Friday I visited our local big box stores and every one of them were selling late blight infested plants.  I bought a couple of plants with symptoms and the diagnosis was confirmed by the pathologist at the UConn diagnostic lab. The distributor of the plants is taking all tomato plants off the shelf at all sites, but clerks at one of the stores told me they had already sold thousands or tens of thousands of the infected plants. What's worse is that every Extension agent and pathologist that checked stores anywhere in the Northeast found late blight infested plants.  That means we have thousands of home gardens from Maryland to Ohio and north to Maine and Quebec that are acting as sources of late bight spores and perfect weather for late blight development (cool and wet). This situation is unprecedented. This is also the earliest that late blight has ever been detected, so there is a whole lot of season left for the infections to spread. Because this disease is airborne, like powdery or downy mildew, we are not expecting unsprayed tomatoes and potatoes in home gardens or on organic farms to survive the season.  So, you can expect the customers who purchased transplants from you this spring to report back that their tomatoes died.  You can pretty safely tell them that the disease responsible did not come on the plants that they purchased from your farm, but rather spread through the air from surrounding gardens that used transplants purchased at big box stores.  Pathologists throughout the Northeast have been checking for infections on garden center plants that were supplied by local producers and have not found any late blight. 

Now here is the bad news!  If the weather doesn't get dryer soon, even plantings on commercial farms that are using the most effective fungicides may not survive the season, because this epidemic will start to snowball, bathing the plants in more and more spores as the season progresses.  There are already commercial farms in southern Quebec, up-state NY and PA where late blight has been confirmed. We expect many more infected farms to be reported next week and it will get worse as we go along. 

All tomato and potato plantings should be protected with effective fungicides.  Maneb or Manzate can be used prior to the fruit turning pink. After fruit begins to ripen, you can alternate every 5-7 days with applications of Bravo and Tanos + copper. You are required to use a protectant fungicide, such as copper, when applying Tanos.  If the weather turns dry later in the season, you can then begin to stretch the interval between sprays to 10 days.  Other products that have proven to be very effective against late blight include Ranman and Previcure Flex.  If you find plants that are infected in your field, dispose of those plants off farm to limit the amount of spores produced.       

European corn borer
Corn borer pheromone traps in Shelton, Berlin and East Hartford captured between 0 or 2 borer moths, which means that egg laying is over.  There will be a few eggs left to hatch this week so continue to scout pre-tassel stage corn for live borer larvae. Pre-tassel stage plantings ranged from 10-24% infested plants this week, and farms in Shelton, Northford and Berlin had fields that exceeded thresholds at pre-tassel and required treatments. If you find more than 15% of the pre-tassel plants infested you should spray twice about 3-5 days apart.  Fields that have infestations right about at the threshold level can be sprayed a single time, when the first few tassels in the field open fully.  Selective products such as SpinTor, Avaunt, Intrepid and B.t will control the borer and spare predators that will migrate into your mixed vegetables to help provide some control of pests.  

Corn earworm
We captured 0.5 CEW moths per night in pheromone traps in Shelton, down from 1.5 per night last week.  Shelton is now on a 6 day spray schedule on fresh silking corn. CEW traps in East Lyme, Berlin, East Hartford and Ellington were all empty and those farmers are not spraying silking corn at this time.  If you have silking corn on your farm, you should set up a Heliothis pheromone trap and bait it with a Hercon brand CEW lure.  You can purchase these supplies at greatlakesIPM.com.

Set up your fall armyworm traps
It is also time to put up your small green IP trap in very young whorl stage plantings to capture FAW moths.  Don't forget that you need to add a Vapona killing strip to the bucket of the trap and bait it with a pheromone lure in the top, for these traps to work.  If you, catch the adult FAW moths, with purple hind wings, then it simply means that you need to start scouting whorl and pre-tassel corn again.