Tough time to be a plant
First no rain, then on to waterlogged soils
WHO would be volunteering to be a plant in our environment, especially a chickpea plant?
Planted fairly deep back in May or June, or even July in some cases, no rain since then and now just struggling to go reproductive with flowers, pods and then achieve physiological maturity and not just plant death.
Then you add this late rain, which in many cases is very useful for future cropping desires.
It will however not help many chickpea crops that need to be desiccated or harvested right now.
I cannot do much about the weather but you need to be aware of what may be happening in your ripe and mature crops of chickpeas, and even some of the late and still very green ones.
Diseases like ascochyta and botrytis can still affect these late green crops.
So no matter how poor they look, if you want to harvest some decent grain samples off them you need to protect them with fungicides.
After rain events fungicide applications are not useful for protection, only products of the two major diseases mentioned above, but most importantly they may not comply with the withholding periods (WHP).
For example Mancozeb needs a four-week withholding time to harvest.
So while it is a good, cheap and effective all-purpose fungicide with good plant coverage by the droplets, it has this 28-day WHP that can get in impact on the earliest harvest date.
I have been receiving plenty of enquiries about moulds, black sooty appearances or dark discolourations on seed pods and ripe seeds.
It was a similar story last year and DAF investigations, along with identifying these
❝All you can do is hope the skies clear above your chickpea paddocks only...
— Paul McIntosh
discolourations, came up with all sorts of mould names like cladosporium, alternaria, rhizopus, fusarium, aspergillus and phoma. Full credit to Lisa Kelly who identified all these culprits and many more.
Now, what can you do to combat the problem?
The simple answer is basically nothing in the paddock. Our fungicides will not help you with these six moulds mentioned above or many others.
All you can do is hope the skies clear above your chickpea paddocks only, so they can grow, flower, pod and achieve physiological maturity before December.
It is important that you do not cross the line with WHP timings as the penalties are too large to contemplate.
For the future with seed blocks, choose carefully what options you have and also look after the seed over summer by keeping it dry, cool and insect free.