The Pistachio + Walnut Doctor

Yesterday, Yong, Georgios and i visited the most severely affected Star Ruby grapefruit orchard. The damage is so severe that the grower is going to remove the orchard. The non infected portion of trees looked so deep green and healthy! Great location for this grapefruit!

Not all twig blights are due to disease. These in this photo are caused by the peach twig borer! Evidence is shown by the channel the PTB created in the center of these twigs: damaged twigs and cross section at the lower part of the killed twig.

The same type of lesions and even more severe damage can occur, after spraying with a combination of chemicals that may form a “hot” spray solution.

No, these lesions are not Botryosphaeria lesions; they resemble to those caused by Bot but they are not. Using a razor, you easily can scrape these superficially damaged spots by the drift of a herbicide.

@TuckerCarlson Tucker, My condolences to you and your family. Thank you for sharing the life story of your father. Amazing and so much talented man. We love you, Tucker, and your thoughtful discussions and editorials. God bless you and give you strength! Themistocles

Obituary for my father. Richard Warner Carlson died at 84 on March 24, 2025 at home in Boca Grande, Florida after six weeks of illness. He refused all painkillers to the end and left this world with dignity and clarity, holding the hands of his children with his dogs at his feet. He was born February 10, 1941 at Massachusetts General Hospital to a 15-year-old Swedish-speaking girl and placed in the Home for Little Wanderers in Boston, where he developed rickets from malnutrition. His legs were bent for the rest of his life. After years in foster homes, he was placed with the Carlson family in Norwood, Mass. His adoptive father, a tannery manager, died when he was 12 and he stopped attending school regularly. At 17, he was jailed for car theft, thrown out of high school for the second time, and enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps. In 1962, in search of adventure, he drove to California. He spent a year as a merchant seaman on the SS Washington Bear, transporting cargo to ports in the Orient, and then became a reporter. Over the next decade, he was a copy boy at the LA Times, a wire service reporter for UPI and an investigative reporter and anchor for ABC News, covering the upheaval of the period. He knew virtually every compelling figure of the time, including Jim Jones, Patty Hearst, Eric Hoffer, Jerry Garcia, as well as Mafia leaders and members of the Manson Family. In 1965, he was badly injured reporting from the Watts riots in Los Angeles. By 1975, he was married with two small boys, when his wife departed for Europe and didn’t return. He threw himself into raising his boys, whom he often brought with him on reporting trips. At home, he educated them during three-hour dinners on topics that ranged from the French Revolution to Bolshevik Russia, PG Wodehouse, the history of the American Indian and, always, the eternal and unchanging nature of people. He was a free thinker and a compulsive book reader, including at red lights. He left a library of thousands of books, most dog-eared and filled with marginalia. His reading and life experiences convinced him that God is real. He had an outlaw spirit tempered by decency. In 1979, he married the love of his life, Patricia Swanson. They were together for 44 years, all of them happy. She died sixteen months before he did and he mourned her every day. In 1985, he moved to Washington to work for the Reagan Administration. He spent five years as the director of the Voice of America, and then moved to the Seychelles as the US ambassador. In 1992, he became the CEO of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and later ran a division of King World television. The last 25 years of his life were spent in work whose details were never completely clear to his family, but that was clearly interesting. He worked in dozens of countries and breakaway republics around the world, and was involved in countless intrigues. He knew a number of colorful national leaders, including Rafic Hariri of Lebanon, Aslan Abashidze of Adjara, Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire, and whomever runs Somaliland. He was a fundamentally nonjudgmental person who was impossible to shock, and he described them all with amused affection. He spoke to his sons every day and had lunch with them once a week for thirty years at the Metropolitan Club in Washington, always prefaced by a dice game. Throughout his life he fervently loved dogs. Richard W. Carlson is survived by his sons, Tucker and Buckley, his beloved daughter-in-law Susie, and five grandchildren. He was the toughest human being anyone in his family ever knew, and also the kindest and most loyal. RIP.

Hello my pistachio friends. We just finished on 16 & 17 Nov 2024 the 1st Interl. Pistachio Congress in Lamia, Greece. Thanks to Yannis Chondropoulos, my counterpart in Greece everything went well and smoothly! 300+ participants learned all the newest information given by experts.

Notice the LFB (leaffooted bug) Hemiptera insect feeding on pomegranate. It creates wounds that may lead to diseases. Wounds can be observed easily internally in the rind of the fruit as pin-point brown spots.

Even backyard Star Ruby grapefruits show severe Neoscytalidium branch wilt! This was the case in this house in Madera Ranchos. The infection progressed so much that reached the main trunk of this tree. The owner admitted he will remove it and perhaps plant another kind of tree.

An infection of KEARNEY AG RES & EXT CENTER of ash trees by a branch wilt disease showed at the end of 2024 summer. It looks like the Neoscytalidium branch wilt of walnut and grapefruit. Test are being done now to see whether in fact we are dealing with the same Neoscytalidium.

Another 3 severely- infected Star Ruby grapefruit orchards in Porterville, CA. Notice severe gumming on an infected branch; severe infection of a tree; deformed tree due to excess cutting of dead shoots; and the typical sporulation of Neoscytalidium dimidiatum!

Apparently, Botryosphaeria colonizes the weak and dead branches in the low part of the pistachio (and walnut) trees due to shading. Bot then grows saprophytically and develops a layer of pycnidia in the bark. See example of pistachio bark with a coat of black Bot pycnidia!

In a quick stop by the former Tree Improvement Center in Chico (now Forest Service) I showed my co-workers Victor Gabri, Jacob Luna, and Georgios Makris what i believe is the largest and oldest pistachio tree in california (maybe in USA), planted in 1929 (it is a male tree).

For years now, I was saying Botryosphaeria does not infect walnut leaves until this year. No leaf lesions, but entire leaflet or leaf blight by infecting the leaf petiole (black). Interesting, isn’t? I am glad i checked these blighted leaves when we collected the fruit samples.

In my trip to Chile, l was very impressed with the dedication of Chileans in painting the pruning wounds with a fungicide-paint. Although this approach may be effective in Prunus and other trees with hard wood, in walnuts does not seem to be effective against Bot-ceae pathogens.

Yesterday, i saw the most damage the Neoscytalidium had in a Star Ruby (SR) orchard! Among the multitude of infected trees, there were a few trees with old cankers, meaning that the disease had its marks in the past. I was first became aware of this disease in 2017, again on SR.

In the hazelnut orchard with no problems so far the group discussed defects of the nuts, i.e., Fusarium spp. developing in the kernel cavity as well as what i believe they had stigmatomycosis, identified from the photos presented. Hemiptera is a pest damaging hazelnut nuts.

Thanks to Dr. Ernesto Moya, we visited today a Chandler walnut orchard with a lot of dead shoots covered with pycnidia of Botryosh/ceae. Unfortunately pruning wounds treated with the common pink color fungicide had very long cankers, up to 15cm long. I expected this for walnuts.

Today Dr. Ernesto Moya and i visited walnut, hazelnut, and sweet cherry orchards. Hazelnuts had no problems but sweet cherries had freeze damage, loaded with bacterial canker (fermentation smell of cankers very distinct).

@FungusCrous What a great idea! Bravo!

Walking through a public park, I noticed that the recommendations of the plant pathologists are followed religiously. Notice the methodic treatment (painting with a fungicide) of the pruning wounds in these trees of the park! Bravo! Bravo! Bravissimo!