Rain, rain, go away

When I first started this internship we were working in the lab with cercospera. This is a fungi in tobacco that causes frog-eye, a leaf disease. I started this work as a student worker early this year and now I am wrapping everything up to gather final data for one of my summer projects.
The weather has not allowed us to do much work in the field yet, but we have made several trips to look at plant diseases in greenhouses. One of the main tomato greenhouses we looked at was in Taylor county and there we found Botrytis Gray Mold, which occurs where leaf pruning has taken place and causes plant wilting and inhibits yield. There is a farm in Clark county that raises several hundred trays of tobacco plants in floatbeds and that is another place where we have spent much time. The main disease at this farm is known as Pythium Root Rot, and is easily spotted because it causes yellowed areas of plants. This disease is mainly spread through using old trays that already have the spores present in them, then it can be transmitted through the water to surrounding trays. When a plant is infected with pythium, the lower leaves turn yellow and wilt. Roots turn light brown to gray colored and if gone untreated they will turn brown to gray with a slimy texture. These will eventually fall off leaving the plant without a root system.
We have put down plastic in Casey county that will be used for a sentinel plot with watermelons, which I seeded in the greenhouse and will be planted in the field later this week. As soon as the weather allows in Lexington we will be setting tobacco and planting more watermelons for another sentinel plot on the UK research farm.