Warm Fall Temperatures, Plant Vigor and Mites in Strawberries

The link below is to a paper written by Doug Walsh, Frank Zalom, Doug Shaw and my predecessor Norman Welch.  It succinctly makes the point that a warm fall following transplanting decreases plant vigor, encourages precocious bloom and can predispose strawberry plants to infestation by twospotted spider mites.  Rain can reduce overwintering mite populations, but still warm fall temperatures will decrease plant vigor.

http://www.calstrawberry.com/research_library/97-04.pdf

With the understanding that this fall and winter has more than even odds of being an "El Niño" year (http://www.elnino.noaa.gov/), which could result in warmer temperatures and more precipitation, growers and agricultural people might want to be thinking about being a little bit longer than customary on cold conditioning of the day neutrals up here on the Central Coast.

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