Dear Editor
First I should thank the editor of the News-Optimistfor publishing my first letter about the plant disease. Here comes another chapter.
After letter writing and some phoning including by my sister Maureen Bexson, I finally have had some action, from two women.
They are from the livestock division of the Government of Saskatchewan.
Fresh samples of various plants, shrubs and trees were sent to a lab and they are presently being cultured. June 22, I went eight miles west northwest to check cattle and on leaving the pastures I spotted the disease on some wild plants, saskatoon berry bushes. It isn't far from a saskatoon berry orchard. The next day, thanks to one of the women I mentioned, a crop specialist came to the farm. He was on time to see the burning of a cherry tree and an apple tree, both heavy with fruit and twisted with infection, and also the branch of a heritage crabapple that bears heavily year after year. For 70 years, in fact.
He took samples and photographs and I took him past a beautiful new plantation that I'd checked only a few days before and there was a three-foot tall hybrid poplar twisted and dead. Just like the three-foot columnar poplar I'd pulled up and burned. I showed him where the problem was going down the ditch on alfalfa. Yes, as in hay crops.
The next day I had to be in Lashburn, 12 miles by road, 10 if by bird, to the southwest, and I took a quick walk around town. Elm trees, Manitoba maple, cherries and tomato plants — these latter will soon be dead — were infected.
Several people have spoken to me and said they think they might have the same problem on their farmsteads. So much for farm chemical spray drift!
I spent several days working on clematis. Tender plants are first to be attacked, on the new growth. I have a 40-foot long, 30-foot high clematis windbreak built of lattice on power poles. There was two feet of new growth all along the top to be cut and burned. There are smaller lattice fences and arbours on which these superb vines grow and flower and I worked on them.
I keep checking rare roses and trees not usually grown here, such as chestnut, linden and the golden maple. I know I’m just holding the disease at bay.
So far it has hit 12 wild plants, not including saskatoon. The wild raspberry wilts quickly. So far I haven't seen it on garden raspberries. Six varieties of trees, including a young Brandon cedar, have been consigned to the fire. Garden plants infected have been peas, tomatoes and grapes.
About 12 ornamentals have been hit. At least six shrubs and vines such as clematis, Virginia creeper and the creeping cedar are also damaged. And then there are the fruit trees.
I expect that, by and large, there aren't a great number of really dedicated gardeners in this area and there are so called stewards of the land who won't know one tree from another, ("What's special about some poplars?") and others who state trees are weeds and should be eliminated. Stewards, my Aunt Fanny.
Putting ignorance aside for the moment, the disease is devastating and now we know it is spreading.
Here we have had a lot of rain and the thing thrives on lush new growth. Of course it is beautiful around the countryside, but I told the government crops specialist, "I'm having a beautiful summer from hell."
Anyone is invited to drop in and look at what I'm talking about. It's the place with the plume of smoke. If I didn't have some excellent help right now I would be in a nasty mess.
Christine Pike
Waseca
