A new guide is providing Australian nurseries with instructions on how to host a plant styling event that attracts customers and boosts sales.

Helping to bring the Plant Life Balance app to life, it includes all the information to get started, as well as a checklist of props and tasks to ensure a successful event in-store.

Most props will already be available, and with assistance from the new guide and some team creativity, the live app experience can be set up easily and effectively. More

The challenges and opportunities to make our cities greener and more liveable in the future were under the spotlight earlier this month, as key representatives from local and state government, universities, industry and business converged on Old Government House in Parramatta.

It marked the fourth event of the Green Light Tour: a national roadshow funded by the nursery industry to build capacity in local councils by sharing with them the latest policy updates and research findings, as well as best practice case studies on greening.

The Green Light Tour aims to deliver the findings of the nursery industry’s latest research report ‘Where Should All The Trees Go’ and bring together key decision makers and councils to progress their urban forest strategies and greening projects. More

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