It’s been a busy few months for the nursery industry’s biosecurity program.

The detection of citrus canker in the Northern Territory in April prompted an immediate response from government and industry, to support a swift and coordinated plan to a detection of this nature.

The latest detection in Western Australia does not indicate that citrus canker is spreading, but have resulted from the tracing of infected host plants from the Northern Territory.

Control zones and movement restrictions have been quickly implemented in both jurisdictions, and there have been no detections in other areas of the country.

Work is underway to determine the likely origins of the latest outbreak of citrus canker, and industry will be kept up to date on the response plan as it develops. More

Integrated Pest Management (IPM) brings together the elements of pest prevention, pest assessment, pest mitigation and process revision.

NGIA is conducting a workshop for nursery production to provide growers with an understanding of how the Nursery Production Farm Management System brings these elements together to form the platform for an IPM system in nursery production.

• Date: 28 June 2018
• Time: 10am to 3pm (Lunch provided)
• Venue: Green Fingers Potting Mix, 709 Stapylton-Jacobs Wells Rd, Woongoolba QLD 4207
• Presenter: John McDonald – NGIA National Biosecurity Manager

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Category: Phytophthora

Importance: Common and serious nursery pathogens, some species are exotic.

Symptoms: Phytophthora pathogens attack all parts of a plant including roots and crowns, fruit, leaves, stems, flowers and buds causing root rot, collar rot, tree canker, stem lesions, bud rot, heart rot, leaf blight, fruit rot, tuber and corm rot.

Common symptoms include rotting of roots, rotting of trunk at ground level, leaf yellowing and death, dieback, leaf drop, stunting of older plants, discolouration and wilting of the upper parts of the plant. May also cause seedling damping-off. Some species cause stem and foliage lesions.

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Long waits for diagnostic test results to identify unknown plant diseases could soon be a thing of the past, with research underway to investigate point-of-care tools for production nurseries, that will inform management decisions and assist in future prevention processes at the grower level.

Point-of-care tools, or smart surveillance tools, allow for the testing of the disease to be done in the field, giving growers fast, reliable identification of plant pathogens without the wait time of laboratory testing.

The one-year project A review of diagnostic technologies to benefit the Australian nursery industry (NY16003), a strategic levy investment under the Hort Innovation Nursery Fund, is being driven by Agriculture Victoria Research in partnership with the Nursery and Garden Industry Australia (NGIA).

Project lead Fiona Constable, Principal Research Scientist – Microbiology for Agriculture Victoria Research has spent the last six months reviewing current laboratory based and field deployable diagnostic tests and assessing new technologies that could be developed to improve early detection of key pests. More

Growers now have access to the latest insights on sustainable pesticide usage and effective phytotoxicity management within the context of production nurseries with two webinars now available to view.

The one-hour webinars were recently hosted online by Dr Andrew Manners from the Queensland Department of Agriculture and Fisheries (DAF), and are now available on the Nursery and Garden Industry Australia (NGIA) YouTube channel.

Webinar 1: Pesticide selection for resistance management

This webinar discusses how pesticide resistance occurs, as well as the basic physiology related to pesticide resistance. Pesticide resistance management helps minimise the risk of resistance developing and includes practical recommendations from a production nursery perspective.

The webinar also covers how to choose pesticides within this framework and assist growers in putting together a pesticide plan for pest groups. More

Jong’s Nursery Director, Peter Jong.

The latest cohort of horticultural students are hitting the books for the 2018 Masterclass in Horticultural Business program, developed to equip Australian growers and business owners with high level leadership and business management skills specific to the horticultural industry.

Proudly supported by the Hort Frontiers Leadership Fund, roughly 30 participants will spend the next six months studying a range of topics, from financial management and law to marketing and communications, through flexible online study offered though University of Tasmania (UTAS) and face-to-face intensives.

There are two participants representing the nursery industry, Peter Jong, from Jong’s nursery in Mount Compass in South Australia, and Ben Scoble from Speciality Trees in Narre Warren East, Victoria.   More