This winter-spring has been my first excursion into growing strawberries in a high tunnel. It didn’t take much for our own Wenjing Guan to convince me to plant some; who doesn’t love to eat fresh strawberries? We planted them back in October and I just peeked at them every couple of weeks throughout the winter, looking for hungry herbivores wanting to share the impending treats. There were spider mites at first (Figure 1) and we made a few releases of the predatory mites Phytoseiulus persimilis and sachets containing Amblyseius (Neoseiulus) Californians. Figure 1. Two-spotted spider mites on strawberry leaves (above) and under a microscope camera (below). This spring, when the weather started warming up and the extra cover was lifted inside the tunnels we found less mites, almost none at all at this point, but an explosion of aphids (Figure 2) and an increasing presence of whiteflies (Figure 3). The[Read More…]

At the Southwest Purdue Ag Center, we are studying annual strawberry production on plastic mulch. Our hope is to gather information for best production practices in our area. As we learn about insect and disease problems, we will pass this information on to producers. This article is about the insect pests we have observed in our strawberries that were planted in March 2019. Armyworm– Toward the end of the spring harvest, we observed significant damage on strawberry fruit caused by armyworms. Beet armyworm and yellowstriped armyworm larvae were found in the field (Figure 1 and 2).  They feed on both green and ripe strawberries. More than 30% fruit became unmarketable because of the insect feeding. Damage was also observed on flowers. Armyworms also cause significant damage when they chew on strawberry crowns and leaves of summer-planted young strawberry plants. Midwest Fruit Pest Management Guide provides several options for controlling the[Read More…]