Vegetable growers will begin thinking about fungicide applications in a few weeks. Many growers will have already purchased fungicides for the 2023 season. Where can Indiana vegetable growers go for fungicide information?
To find recommended fungicides for vegetable fungicides, one may want first to study the Midwest Vegetable Production Guide. One can find this Guide, also known in Indiana as the ID-56, in two places. One, go to mwveguide.org. The online Guide is searchable. When one brings up the home page, one can search for the vegetable crop and disease, insect, or weed pest of choice. The data for the webpage are kept up-to-date constantly. If a change is made to the Guide, the online version will be changed almost instantly.
Let’s conduct an example search on mwveguide.org.
1. Pretend our crop is watermelon. Click on the pick my crop icon. One can type in watermelon or pick watermelon from a drop-down menu (note that if one starts typing in a crop, the name will be autocompleted).
2. Once one has selected a crop, say watermelon, one will be asked to choose a pest (pest includes disease, insect, or weed pest). Let’s choose gummy stem blight.
2. A list will be generated of recommended fungicides. Note that not all fungicides labeled for gummy stem blight are generated. For example, fungicides in FRAC (FRAC=Fungicide Resistance Action Committee) group 11 are not listed because isolates of the gummy stem blight may be resistant to group 11’s (Quadris Opti® and Quadris Top® have group 11 active ingredients but also contain active ingredients that should be effective against gummy stem blight). Similarly, FRAC group 7 fungicides are not listed here.
3. Expand any products listed here to get more information about rates, etc. Note that pest information and non-pesticide options are also listed here.
4. One can also limit the search by greenhouse uses, PHI interval, etc.
5. These searches can be accomplished on desktop computers, laptops, tables, and data phones (The website is responsive).
6. An orange button at the bottom of the list says ‘export as .pdf’. In this way, saving the search and even printing it out for later use is possible.
The Midwest Vegetable Production Guide website also has all the chapters in PDF format that can be downloaded. The first portion of the Guide has information such as fertility and soil recommendations.
Contact the author if you would instead like to purchase the Midwest Vegetable Production Guide as a book for $10. Only the searchable website is updated during the season.
Fungicide information about cucurbits, in particular, can be found on the Southwest Purdue Ag Program website https://ag.purdue.edu/department/arge/swpap/index.html. Go to resources and then to cucurbit resources. One fungicide schedule is posted for cantaloupe and watermelon and another for pumpkins. These can be downloaded as PDFs. Or one can contact the author for hard copies. These schedules are updated at least annually. The link for the cantaloupe and watermelon schedule is https://ag.purdue.edu/department/arge/swpap/_docs/melon-fungicide-schedules_egel-20232.pdf.
The link for the pumpkin fungicide schedule is https://ag.purdue.edu/department/arge/swpap/_docs/pumpkin-fungicide-schedules_egel-march-2023-copy.pdf.
Regardless of where one obtains fungicide information, check the label. The crop and rate information that must be followed is always on the label. If there is any conflict between the information described above and the fungicide label, the label information must be followed.