Texas Plant Disease Diagnostic Lab-
WHAT Wednesday Videos
Category Archives: News
One day late….what about my dying tree.
This post is one day late from my attempts to post something every Friday. Things have been busy in the Plant Clinic with the 2nd week of classes at Texas A&M. We are trying to get our student workers started in the lab… but nothing always works on my own time schedule. Due to delays, I only have one of the 3 new student workers being prepped for the Clinic. In my frustrations and anger and disdain at the inefficiency, I was reminded that I am exhibiting an… Read More →
Reflecting the past week.
This week has been a doozy. Problems with heating and then getting lots of plant samples with problems someway associated with the heat and drought. At College Station, we did get some rain on Thursday – but still not enough to overcome the current drought conditions. The drought (and heat) is expected to continue on… On a different level, we are experiencing another drought. This year we have seen the effects of shrinking state and federal budgets affecting our programs. Most recently, the increase of fees at the… Read More →
Heat… hits home.
This Monday morning was not a good one. Upon arriving at the Plant Clinic, I heard an annoying beeping sound from our minus 80 freezer. Coupled with the warm room, it dawned on me that the air conditioning was not functioning. Checking the logs, I surmised that the ambient temperature in the lab was out of range as of 11:00pm (2300) yesterday night. To make things even more annoying, it was only our wing of the building (on the first floor) that had our a/c out-of-order, even the… Read More →
Long silence….
I apologize for the long silence as the schedule has just been crazy for the past 3 weeks. In early August, both the Plant Clinic diagnostician and I, and a bunch of our Texas A&M colleagues made our way to Hawaii for the Annual American Phytopathological Society meeting. This was a joint meeting with the the International Association for Plant Protection Sciences (IAPPS). That meant lots of folks from all around the world, and a bunch of interesting research that was presented along with discussion of situation with agriculture in… Read More →
Landscape herbicide damage in the news.
Yesterday while reading the Sunday papers, I came across an article on potential herbicide damage in landscape. I was a little surprised that this news showed up here but I get the problem must have gotten worse over the past month. The story goes that a new herbicide, Imprelis™ which is produced by DuPont, may have cause a detrimental damage to conifers, primarily Norway Spruce and White Pine. This problems has been noted in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Ohio and a bunch or other states in the northeast and… Read More →
