Easter Weekend

GCI Life Sciences wishes everyone a Happy Easter!

Easter lilies are seasonal and traditional flowering plants. 95% of the bulbs for the Easter lily market are produced by 10 farms along the California-Oregon border.

More information on these unique flowers can be found at this site. The plants are under special controlled conditions and nutritional requirements to bloom specifically for the Easter Holiday.

Some issues specific to Easter Lilies include fungus gnats, Pythium root rot (on which my M.Sc. and Ph.D dissertations are on) as well as Rhizoctonia. Graeme Murphy, a colleague from OMAF outlines these issues quite well in his article titled "Fungus Lilies And Easter Gnats (or something similar)".

Many of the issues surrounding Easter lilies can be combated with a little bit of foresight and planning. Producers familiar with the crop know many of the tricks of the trade that surrounds the management of these issues, but new problems arise almost on a yearly basis, and so do solutions. There are a few biologicals on the market, but it's hard to pick just one and say it'll do the trick. Experimentation with several biologicals is time consuming and yields ambiguous results if not done properly.

But why experiment in the first place? Well, one greenhouse can differ from others - research greenhouses in which the tests are done in originally are rigidly controlled, meaning that the natural fluctuations in temperature, light or even nutrition are absent or minimized to such a degree that it would be almost uneconomical in a commercial facility. The results should then be approached with a degree of salt-taking!

Secondly, it's not a good idea to rely on one or even two methods of preventation and/or control - something that many experimental trials fail to cover. Think of your strategy as being comparable to a rocket launch. In case the primary system (your first choice of biological control) fails, you want to ensure there's a back-up in place at the same time the primary is working. What, then, if the back-up fails too? The rocket (your crop), if no third or fourth fail-safe is in place, crashes. This is a bit of a hard-case example which illustrates the worst-case scenario, as a 100% loss is clearly not an acceptable solution.... but it's a scenario that can be preventable with a plan and some hindsight.