Summer marches onwards..

With the flowering done now for the Spring plants the focus is firmly on producing nice healthy bulbs for the next season. I have changed the feed routine at the beginning of this month and am now using a fertiliser with a bit more K (Potassium) to aid flower development and disease resistance and a bit less N (Nitrogen) as I hope that leaves are fully grown now. I have applied both systemic insecticide and fungicide so far this year and will do so again in a month or so time.

The capillary matting I installed over the winter has been a huge help in keeping temperatures down and humidity high in the last few weeks during the hot weather, this along with early morning damping down i feel has helped the plants handle this heat spike.

The work I am doing to develop a robust and reliable test for virus (Poty-Y and PlFBV) is coming along nicely and I have had some very positive results so far. Everyday has been a learning day and one of the main things I have taken away recently is that the 'incubation period' of the virus is between 10 and 21 days, meaning that clean plants can come to an infected collection and pick up and then display symptoms quite quickly, this is why I run a quarantine system to ensure new plants do not mingle with my established collection until I can be as sure as I can at present (remember, no reliable test just yet) that plants are clean. Some plants, depending on their general background health may not show virus symptoms at all, however plants which have been stressed (extremes of cold, heat etc) could show symptoms pretty quickly. I have posted a few pics below of the tests in use.

Mushing up a flower.

Sampling a leaf.

The red line is the control, to show the test has worked. Its a NEGATIVE result.

I treated this as feint POSITIVE and quarentined.

A very strong and clear POSITIVE.

I have been testing flowers and leaf material to cross reference findings and it is proving very insightful, I am hoping that the test will easily pick up virus presence in leaf material rather than having to wait for flowers - this has always been one of the main reasons I have not sold, and do not agree with the selling of tiny bulbils or NFS plants - you could have a silent assassin hiding in your plants. The hope is that this test will allow growers to test any plant with as little as 1cm² of leaf material for both virus before investing considerable time and money in growing plants on that may be infected.

I have had some really good support from the growing community out there and it appears that there is a real desire to get to the bottom of this issue, however, a warning note may be that by having a reliable test we all may find that virus runs deeper than we currently think, I fear I may have open a real can of worms.

There is still much more to do and the autumn flowering plants will be here soon.

Happy growing.

Stu