Cornell no longer provides free access on-line to it’s annual publication. UMass does but only slightly out of date versions. They don’t change much year to year so it can still be quite useful.
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http://fruit.umext.umass.edu/tfruit/2015netfmg/2015NETreeFruit.pdf
This one is for the 2015 publication. UMass has a wide range of publications for the taking on-line.
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Thanks Alan!
that is a ton of information. As I read over it I noticed a chemical that I plan to use (Imidan) is highly toxic to bees which I plan start keeping. Hopefully they will survive well planned applications.
Has the money started to dry up, or are they just focused on commercial growers, used to be vasts swaths of info and guidance for small home gardeners, now not much info is available.
My cooperative extension agent says budgets are shrinking as far as expenses to provide free info to anyone, commercial or not, although there are still new outlets of state funded information sprouting out all the time via the internet. I’ve no idea how the funding for on-line publications and grower alerts (for fire blight conditions and the like) is allotted and how some things are greenlighted and some not.
It doesn’t cost a great deal of money to put the Cornell guidelines on-line compared to the cost of putting them together in a paper book that Cornell sells every year at a big loss ( I assume). I can’t imagine the $25 dollars or so they charge for this 240 page, extremely limited, edition comes close to paying expenses.
It is funny that the U Mass publication is taken verbatim from the Cornell one and they make it available on-line but Cornell does not. There is obviously a lot of inefficiency going on here. Only a single New England version is needed to dispense this info and most of the info applies throughout the world. The U.S. needs to centralize this stuff, IMO. 5 modified versions of this publication could serve the entire country.
Extension budgets have been shrinking in my state also. I believe the plant breeding efforts that produced peaches like Winblo and Contender or blueberry like O’neil and Premier have been axed to save money. Extension specialist in a few south east states have done what you suggested and cooperated to produce a single manual for fruit production for the entire region. One for Peaches, one for Apples and one for Brambles. I use them a lot. Here is the link to the Peach manual.
Thank you BT, I just read the brief description of bacterial spot issues and found it very informative. I bookmarked the link and it will be part of my winter reading.