Browse Commercial Plant Disease Stories - Page 12

Every year home gardeners call their University of Georgia Cooperative Extension office to ask, "What's causing my tomatoes to fire up?" This is how most people describe a disease known as early blight.

Few things in the garden seem to cause as much joy, heartbreak or anxiety as the fate of the summer’s backyard tomato harvest.

Beautiful plants often don’t live up to their potential. Getting to the root of problems like disease and wilt sometimes starts with a look in the mirror, says University of Georgia experts.

University scientists and forestry experts are using rhododendron leaves as bait to detect the presence of a disease that can kill Georgia’s historic oak trees.

Soon after the Jan. 12, 2010 earthquake shocked Haiti, crumbling its capitol and killing an estimated 250,000 people, a team of experts from the University of Georgia College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences traveled there to assess how the college could help foster sustainable agriculture.

In southeast Georgia, an area of the state known for its blueberries, Brantley Morris of Morris Nursery in Alma, Ga., gets calls at least once a week from farmers who want to grow pomegranate trees.

A University of Georgia scientist wants to keep an exotic disease from striking one of the most popular cut flowers: gladiolus.

Mother Nature blessed Georgia row-crop farmers in 2009 with perfect weather, which helped bring record-setting results. This year, however, she wasn’t as cooperative and sent the hottest April through September on record – the kind of weather that can hurt.

Most gardeners view rainfall as a good thing. But too much of a good thing, namely rain, can be bad.

University of Georgia research isn’t done just by professors in laboratories in Athens, Ga. It’s also conducted in fields, orchards and gardens statewide by UGA Cooperative Extension agents, who look to solve problems for the people in their counties.