Grape phomopsis
Unlike raspberries and
strawberries, which carry through for us nearly no matter what, grapes
have been a problem on our farm. We started out with French hybrid grapes,
which attracted Japanese beetles like crazy (and which happened to have
seeds, meaning that Mark wouldn't eat them). There were also some
disease issues with those early vines, but to be honest, the other
problems were so big I never even got to the point of figuring out what
diseases I was dealing with.
After Mark pulled those vines out,
I planted two Mars Seedless in fall 2011. The grape vines were
pretty minuscule when they arrived, so only this year have they started
to come back onto my radar. One plant (pictured at the top of this
post and to the right) clearly needs some weeding and training, but is
otherwise thriving. We might even get to taste a few grapes this
year! The other...isn't.
Diseases in our garden
are nearly always fungal, exacerbated by our wet weather, and the issue
facing this ailing grape is no exception. I'm pretty sure what I'm
seeing is symptoms of Phomopsis viticola,
and since I don't spray anti-fungals, the solution is to prune off the
affected areas. If I hadn't been sticking my head in the ground, I
could have pruned a lot less, but I'll just hope that pruning now will
keep the other grape from catching the fungal disease.
The good news is that
Phomopsis (as people often refer to the disease) can also cause fruit
rot, so perhaps it's responsible for the other issue I've had on grapes
all along. Only time will tell whether better garden sanitation
practices will allow us to eat chemical-free grapes.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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