Albino...

A little snippet from the past week.  I was cleaning up the raspberry trials at the Extension Research Farm and stumbled across an albino mutation.  I was completely boggled, after a quick e-mail to someone who knows a lot more about berries than I do, I learned that this is caused by herbicide uptake.  I have a sneaking suspicion that the plant won't live long, it should be very vulnerable to sunburn.  Chlorophyll, which is what makes plants green, acts like sunblock in a sense, it reflects some of the light that hits the plant.  Also, I don't think this plant will be able to make enough carbohydrates to support the plant appropriately.  Albinism is a likely death sentence for this plant.

We put down a pre-emergent herbicide in the rows last fall because our berries have some serious problems, and weed pressure adds to the problems.  Signs and symptoms equivalent to that of a virus (curling, margin burning, stunting, poor fruit formation, yellowing leaves, interveinal chlorosis) are showing up in the patch, moving from west to east.  I noticed it last year, alerted a professor, and ended up sending samples of plants to the USDA virus research team in Washington.  They have tested the berries for every kind of virus and have come up with nothing.  Which means either we have a new, never before seen virus, or it is a viroid or phytoplasm.  Whatever it is we are seeing symptoms already this year.

To help the berries, we put down a good dose of pre-emergent to see if we could lower the stress caused by weed pressure.  What struck me as so odd about this photo is that there are leaves from the same plant that did not show any color change in response to the herbicide.  Plant nerd alert, I found this fascinating!  Maybe if this is a new virus, we can name it Farmgal's Blight...  Sounds like something off Anne of Green Gables, romantic and ridiculous!