Things that make you go Hmmm!

[SwampDonkey]

Yeah I understand that, it's like spraying potatoes to keep blight away.


We see disease resistance also in beech. There will be a large smooth beech in  a stand of diseased, crooked, half dead ones. I'm not sure there is much of a flurry of activity to save the beech though. Although there is some funding, I link Dr Judy Loo works on it some, but it is very small potatoes in the scheme of things.

[Tamiam]

I'm sorry to post that we missed the meeting this week but Kevin has found who the protester is and who runs the wildlife area to be clearcut.  We will try to bring you both sides.

the latest decision is to provide a  35 foot buffer between the clearcut and the road to make the residents happy.

[farmerdoug]

The virus was not sprayed on but injected like in a human.  The virus does not kill the blight but surrounds it so it dies out like a forest fire.  The blight kills the trees when it gridles the trunk.  The virus is spread via animal contact like squirrels and through the root systems when they graft together.

[rpg52]

I'm not sure how this relates to any of this, but it is interesting.  There is a mycologist (fungi guy) named Paul Stamets who recently wrote a book called Mycelium Running.  In it he discussed endophytes, fungi that inhabit plants, but don't cause disease, though in trees, they may cause conks, the woody fruiting body found on tree trunks.

He specifically mention a call he got from a man that managed a chestnut orchard in Quebec.  This manager stated that chaga, a conk or sclerotium of what he considered an endophyte, Inonotus obliquus would prevent Chestnut blight.  He said he had packed lesions of infected chestnut trees with a poultice of ground up chaga, after which the trees healed and recovered, free of blight.

I don't quite know what to make of this, but there you are, another anecdotal cure.
Ray

[SwampDonkey]

Good story anyway, regardless.