Alright then, nothing to do for the hops but wait a while. I could add some fertilizer, but I think they're still recovering from the shock of transplantation. Plus, there's rain this week, so I'll wait.
Back to barley! I have been noticing some strange flag leaves among the bere plants -- the leaf is all rolled up like an onion plant:
In the affected plants, the heads have a hard time emerging from this funky rolled-up leaf:
I had no idea what to make of this, but today when I was doing some light reading on frost susceptability in barley, I ran across an
image on page 11 of this document. The photo showing injury from phenoxy herbicides matches my rolled flag leaves and cramped head exactly. It turns out that phenoxy herbicides include 2,4-D, which I did apply to the bere back in December!
A
little more reading revealed that injury from 2,4-D depends on the species of grain (and presumably even the variety), but commonly occurs in two time periods -- during the boot stage, which some of the bere are in now (I haven't applied any 2,4-D recently), and before tillering, a much earlier stage when side stems formed. I did apply 2,4-D right at the beginning of tillering!
I applied 2,4-D on 12/23/2011, at 190.5 GDD, when the bere plants looked about like this:
Those are Conlon plants pictured, but according to my notes, the bere were at the same developmental stage -- very early tillering. I bet there were some bere plants that had not tillered yet, or that bere is simply more sensitive to 2,4-D injury than Conlon.
There could be other explanations -- insects can cause a similar disease.
Russian wheat aphids can cause the same rolled onion-leaf with a trapped grain head, but their infestation also causes laminar discolorations in the plant leaves. I have some discoloration due to aphids, but not in a striped pattern:
and not even every onion-leafed bere plant has that spotty discoloration.
I did find an insect larvae in two of the heads that were trapped in a flag leaf. I pulled out the heads by hand and discovered in each one an insect lodged inside:
I pulled out 2-3 more trapped heads, but I didn't find an insect in any of them.
So what's going on? I don't know, and I'm pretty curious what this could be. I think I can narrow it down to injury from the 2,4-D being applied a little too early, or a strange insect (non-aphid) disease. I'm leaning toward 2,4-D, but one thing I've learned so far about farming is that a newbie can look at a disease phenotype and come to a completely different conclusion than somebody with more experience. So,
any ideas?