Pests, diseases and prevention : GrowLED Academy

A crop can be run correctly for three months and be lost in a single week. This step covers the major plant health risks in the room, what your design and your climate already prevent, and the particular framework governing the products that may be used on this crop.

Botrytis, the risk that destroys a harvest

Botrytis cinerea attacks the flowers in late bloom, precisely when they are at their densest and closest to harvest. That is what makes it the costliest risk: it strikes at the moment when your crop has already absorbed every one of its costs.

A dense flower sliced in two along its length. The outer half is perfectly healthy, green and firm, with its white stigmas. The core revealed by the cut is brown and collapsed, coated in a grey felt-like growth, and a thin band of still-green tissue separates the two. — **What to look for:** the thin green band between the healthy outside and the destroyed core. It is what explains why nothing shows from the outside. By the time the damage becomes visible at the surface, it has been established for a long time.

Its favourable conditions are documented: relative humidity above 70 % and moderate temperatures, in the range of 17 to 24 °C. Infection is fastest above 85 % humidity.

These conditions are exactly those of a poorly ventilated flowering room. The pathogen does not need to be introduced, it needs to be left the conditions.

The link with the step on climate is direct. A room that drifts towards high humidity does not just lose yield, as the trial cited there showed: it also creates the conditions for botrytis. The two problems have the same cause and the same prevention.

Pests, diseases and prevention.

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Botrytis, the risk that destroys a harvest

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