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market-farming - Re: [Market-farming] Revisiting Raspberry problem

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  • From: "Marlin & Christine Burkholder" <burkholders AT glenecofarm.com>
  • To: "'Market Farming'" <market-farming AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Market-farming] Revisiting Raspberry problem
  • Date: Sun, 15 Jul 2012 19:08:30 -0400

Last raspberry season, Marlin and I wrote about our massive occurrence of  mushy Heritage raspberries on the bottoms.  The berries looked nice on the plant,  when those berries were picked, one could see a liquid inside the bottom of the berry. As the berry ripened, the whole berry got mushy.  Upon microscopic inspection, we could see many white maggots in one berry.  After my picking bucket with seconds of berries set, these little white maggots would crawl out of the raspberries.

Extension folks and others say it is the result of the spotted wing drosophila.  I do not see a correlation with the maggots of the drosophila and what we had.  I have not read any information about what causes the liquid inside the raspberry from which the maggots hatched.  Just a few of our purple raspberries (this season) had that liquid inside the berry.  We don’t have many purple raspberries and they are adjacent to our Hull blackberries.  I read how the red berry mite can keep blackberries red on part of the berry, which I may have seen on some of our blackberries.  We have lots of sap beetles on our overripe blackberries.

I have read that there is a raspberry beetle which “lays eggs in the flowers”, but the hatching or maggots do not seem characteristic of what we saw.

Meredith (who picks and works with us) suggested that it would be helpful if we could take one of those berries and see what hatches out of them.  Does anyone know the best way to do that?

One person from the list responded last year with a similar problem.  Can anyone help in this detective work? Marlin is threatening to spray for the drosophila, and we have never sprayed chemicals on our raspberries in prior years.

Christine Burkholder

 




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