Kelly, that's the first actual trial data on MeloCon I've seen - with very positive and encouraging results! Since it's 100% organic, there shouldn't be any restrictions and hopefully it will eventually be available to home gardeners. However, keeping it frozen presents distribution and retail sales problems - unless they include in in the frozen food section at Walmart
- not enough market for it to say the least. It's probably got a short shelf life too. The minimum order, as I recall, is large - several acres worth - and expensive. It was much more than we could use and they weren't sure if we could keep it in our freezer for a year or not.
That steam sounds interesting - a new one on me. Have you got a link on that? Nematodes only move a few inches a year, so row/band treatment would be adequate. I wonder how they get deep enough, though.
We won't be using Vydate or any other conventional fumigant.
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Hi, Red --
Funny you mention Amelia! That's a real sore spot - almost cost us all our clients and supporters. It makes a beautiful, very large red tomato that is not ripe inside - the firm parts (the "spokes of the wheel") don't ripen with the rest of it. And worse, when people sat them on the sink to ripen-up like a normal tomato, they rotted inside and bled foul-smelling liquids! And the rare one that appeared a little riper, had no taste whatsoever - zero, worse than Walmart! It's resistant to virtually everything - they've bred so much resistance into it that they sacrificed too many other qualities.
Nem resistance is sort of limited for commercial determinates. There are several Mountain varieties that we haven't tried and Sanibel, an old Florida favorite, that we have planted. They all lose their resistance when soil temp reaches about 85 - which for us often happens in late May and we lose most of the crop.
The last couple of years, we planted Solar Fire (a great tomato for us) in nem-free soil, with a fantastic crops in 2009 and 2010. This year's crop was looking super, loaded with healthy green fruit, and then it quit raining in Texas and our water source dried-up. We did manage to salvage one picking. Solar Fire is a super early cultivar, but not early enough to beat the nems, which get active when soil reaches 65-70. It can't be planted where there's nems, period.
Next year I'm going to try resistant crowder peas, sweet corn and resistant sweet potatoes on my infested land. I'm afraid though, that once the soil warms-up, all that stuff will be attacked and killed.
Jack