The most common diseases in strawberries are gray mold, caused by Botrytis cinerea, and strawberry white leaf spot, caused by Mycosphaerella fragariae.
The symptoms of gray mold are most common on buds, flowers and fruit, but very rarely on leaves. Infected buds, then flowers turn brown and die. The most characteristic symptoms of the disease are observed on the fruit.When they start to stain, they are covered with clearly visible brown spots.Then, on the already ripening strawberries, you can see damage similar to crushing.
Fruits rot and their damaged tissue shows a profuse, fluffy, gray coating, a cloud of brown dust falls off its surface after shaking - these are spores of the fungus.To prevent the use of chemical pesticides , reduce the disease by destroying harvest debris, avoiding excessive plant density and careful weeding of plantations.
You can also cover the inter-rows with agrotextile, from flowering to harvest. Thanks to this, we will make it difficult for the fungus spores to get from the soil surface onto the blooming strawberries. During the fruiting period, we can cover the strawberry bushes with a net.
The second common strawberry disease is the white spot of strawberry leaves, which can cause great damage in wet summers.The leaves form small spots, round or oval, gray-white in color, surrounded by a brown-red border. In wet weather, a slight gray coating of the stems and conidia spores appears on the surface of the spots.
Under favorable conditions, the fungus develops intensively, causing the entire leaves to dry out, which contributes to fruiting.The source of the primary infection in spring are last year's dead leaves on which the fungus wintered.The disease is significantly reduced by mowing and removing the leaves. Plants should be mowed at least two weeks after harvest.
Maybe … we will plant strawberries on the balcony?
A disease that resembles white spot in the early stages of development is strawberry leaf spot red spot caused by the fungus Diplocarpon earliana. Carmine-red spots appear on the leaves of strawberries.As the disease progresses, the affected tissue dies and the spot becomes greyish-brown with a brown border.Then the leaf around the spots turns yellow, and with severe infection, the whole leaves turn yellow. The prevention of this disease is to remove the affected fallen leaves.
