High Quality Photos for Thrips Identification: Rating Phone Attachments.

This is a guest post by Avery Johnson (former OMAFA summer student and current M.Sc. student studying Thrips parvispinus) and S. Jandricic.

Having difficulty identifying thrips on sticky cards and need clear photos to send to your consultant or extension agent? Don’t want to invest in a microscope? Well, you’re in luck, because we’ve done the legwork to find some good alternatives to get high quality photos.

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Lewis mites! 2024 Updates in Poinsettia

lewis mite_UCANR — *Lewis mite. Photo from University of California.*

Lewis mite is one of those pests that seems to go in cycles – some years we don’t see it at all, and some years I get reports as early as August.

This year there seems to be scattered reports. Given that Lewis mite populations can ramp up in a warm fall and rear their ugly heads in October, it seemed like a good time for an update on what’s working, and what’s not.

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Poinsettia Pests 2024: Whitefly, Mealybugs and Other Pests

Poinsettia are being potted up and pest issues are already popping up! Read on to see what pests growers in Ontario are seeing, and what to do about them.

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Deficiencies Got You Down?

This post was originally written by Abigail Wiesner, Acting Greenhouse Floriculture Production Specialist, with contributions from Chevonne Dayboll.

As we move through production for fall and winter crops a refresher for nutrient deficiencies feels appropriate.

No matter where you are in a cropping cycle, nutrition problems can be tricky to figure out. The good thing is they can be differentiated from disease or pest issues based on a few key observations:

If the damage is uniform and crop wide, it’s most likely a nutritional issue
If the damage is localized or more random, it’s most likely a disease or pest issue

Keep reading to learn more about different nutrient deficiencies and how to spot them in poinsettias and other crops.

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Ontario’s Crop Protection Hub Highlights: New Features

Hopefully, by now, many of you are familiar with Ontario’s Crop Protection Hub (fondly referred to as “Crop Hub”), a user-friendly tool to look up pesticides and their efficacy against floriculture insects and diseases in the Greenhouse Floriculture module.

Earlier this growing season, new features were released on Crop Hub.

Keep reading to see how these new features is to make it easier for users to view, compare and print crop protection information.

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Upcoming GrowON Webinar: Managing Pesticide Resistance in Greenhouses

Greenhouse IPM practitioners have to produce high quality plants and produce with a more limited chemical arsenal. We also have to deal with several key pests that are known to readily develop resistance to multiple chemical classes, including thrips, whitefly and leafminers. So how do we avoid an uphill run on the resistance treadmill?

Hannah Fraser, Horticulture Entomologist with OMAFA, shares her decades of experience battling resistance issues in fruit crop pests with us in this next webinar.

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In Case you Missed it, GrowON Presents: How to use Light Spectral Combinations to Steer Plants

This post was written by Abigail Wiesner, Acting Floriculture Production Specialist.

In case you missed the recent GrowON presentation on July 22nd, by Dr. Youbin Zheng (University of Guelph) we’ve now uploaded to YouTube!

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“How-to” Video of the Week: Checking the Quality of Predatory Mite Sachets

The “walk-out” technique to assess predatory mite sachets. Details on how to do this (and why!) are in the video. *Photo by R. Buitenhuis.*

In this week’s “how-to” video, we’ll continue exploring how to assess the quality of the biocontrol agents you receive.

This video focuses on a staple of thrips control – predatory mite sachets. These can be a bit trickier to assess than loose product, but it’s important to use the right technique to avoid underestimating the quality of sachets (something even I’ve been guilty of).

Keep reading to find the link to the video and additional resources.

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Greenhouse Biosecurity Workshop – Now in Vineland!

Register for the OSCIA Greenhouse Biosecurity workshop held in-person in Vineland, on August 7th, 2024! Seats still available!

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“How-to” Video of the Week: Checking the Quality of Parasitic Wasps

*An Encarsia wasp emerging from a whitefly.*

Poinsettia (and whitefly) season is almost upon us! So we thought it was fitting that this week’s “how-to” video focuses on on-farm quality control tests of parasitic wasps.

We’ve also got a few videos on how to scout your poinsettia crop for whitefly and implementing a whitefly biocontrol program. Although these are older videos, they still have lots of relevant info, especially for those newer to whitefly biocontrol programs.

Keep reading for the videos and links to further readings.

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