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| Grafted watermelon, newly transplanted in Hermiston, OR. |
It's already been a few weeks since we planted our trials out. The Pacific Northwest is experiencing an unusually rainy cool spring and early summer, so the watermelons planted out at the Mount Vernon NWREC (the research station that is my home base) are struggling. Hopefully, Cliff Mass is right, and the PNW summer will officially start after the 4th of July.
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| P. laying out eggplants at Schreiber and Sons Farm. |
On June 7 and 8, Patti and I travelled over to the Columbia Basin to put in our grafted eggplant and watermelon trials. Our eggplant trials were planted at Schreiber and Sons farm in a field with confirmed Verticillium dahliae populations and a history of major eggplant crop loss from Verticillium.
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| Organizing watermelon treatment blocks in the hotel parking lot. |
The following morning, we put in the watermelon trials in Hermiston, OR. Hermiston, OR is an example of irrigated crop production in the dry sagebrush country of the Columbia Basin. It has hot dry summers. Days are warm and nights are cooler allowing sugar to build up in the day but not burn off at night. Because of the day-night temperature difference, watermelons are sweeter in Hermiston than places like California and Texas. They even have a big slice of watermelon painted on the town water tower.
Hermiston also has very sandy soils. Because of this, they grow row crops interplanted between wheat. The wheat acts as a wind break. If you don't look too closely, you can drive by a seedless watermelon field and mistake it for a wheat field.
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| Patti transplanting grafted watermelon into field in Hermiston, OR. |
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Watermelon trial newly planted at Sam Pollock's field.
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We will be going back over to Hermiston in a few weeks to check on the trials and monitor for Verticillium disease symptoms.
