Rhizoctonia Hot Water Treatment Eliminates from Azalea Cuttings

Rhizoctonia, a fungal disease that can be found in many ornamental plants, can be eliminated in azalea by placing plant cuttings in a hot water treatment, an Agricultural Research Service (ARS) scientist and his university collaborator have found.

Rhizoctonia web blight is an annual problem in azalea cultivars grown in containerized nursery production in the southern and eastern United States. The fungus lives on all azalea plant surfaces and in the pine bark soil throughout the year, yet only causes plant damage in July and August, when heat and humidity peak.

The disease first affects the azalea’s internal leaves during June, with signs often unseen by the grower. Within 24 hours, the shrub can go from appearing healthy to having one-third of its leaves rapidly turn brown and die.

Rhizoctonia is undetectable to the human eye, which means the pathogen can be carried on stem cuttings used to propagate new plants and circulated within nursery stock for years. Current control efforts include treating plants with fungicide to stop the severe plant damage. However, dipping stem cuttings in a disinfestant or fungicide solution has not controlled spread of the fungus, so better control methods are needed.

For more info http://www.ars.usda.gov

Water buybacks get to the billion Dollar Mark

The Federal Water Minister Senator Penny Wong said the buyback had purchased the corresponding of about 651 giga liters of water.

But the South Australian senator acknowledged a need of water in the Murray Darling Basin meant the buyback was yet to deliver important new flows.

"Obviously what is actually allocated in that right will be less and will depend on what State Governments allocate but that is the case across the basin," she said.

"Regrettably we are not seeing a lot of allocations because we have not got a lot of water but the significant thing is this water that will go to the rivers as and when water is available."

The world's looming "water gap"

There's good and bad news from a sweeping new report on the world's water scarcity out this week from McKinsey & Co., and commissioned by such water-dependent companies as Coca-Cola, SAB Miller, Nestle and Syngenta, along with the World Bank/International Finance Corp.

The bad: Global demand for water already exceeds supply - about 1.1 billion people don't have access to clean water - and the so-called water gap is increasing at an accelerating rate.

The good: Cost-effective, sustainable solutions are obtainable to close the gap, particularly if governments and business focus on reducing demand rather than trying to generate additional supply.

The challenge: Getting beyond the nostrum that water is a "human right" so that water, which is perceptibly a scarce resource, can be priced in a way that drives conservation.

One more thing to know: Water issues are at least as complex as energy, and all water problems are local, so generalizing about water, while inevitable, is invariably misleading.