Lettuce big-vein disease: sources, patterns of spread, and losses

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Most batches of lettuce seedlings taken over an 18-month period from a vegetable nursery were infested with lettuce big-vein disease (LBVD) with an up to 31% incidence. Using lettuce seedlings in bait tests, contamination was detected at the nursery in potting mix composted for different periods and in dirt from under the benches, and at the bark supplier's site in this ingredient of the potting mix and waste 'bark' from the ground. In a field experiment in which lettuce seedlings from the infested nursery were inoculated with infested roots or left uninoculated before transplanting into subplots on land with no history of lettuce planting, disease progress followed a sigmoid curve with the former but an almost straight line with the latter. However, significant clustering of symptomatic plants was found only in the subplot with the uninoculated plants. Leaf symptoms of LBVD were more severe in lettuces infested later, whereas symptoms in those infested earlier were obvious initially but then became milder. The disease impaired formation of hearts: the proportion of symptomatic plants that lacked hearts was 24–36% when leaf symptoms first appeared 5–7 weeks after transplanting, but 14–16% after 8–9 weeks. When leaf symptoms first appeared at 5–6 weeks, there was a fresh weight loss of 14–15% for heads (all plants) and 39% for hearts (excluding plants without hearts). When leaf symptoms first appeared 7 weeks after transplanting, there was no significant yield loss for heads and only a 14% loss for hearts. At 8–9 weeks, there were no significant yield losses for heads or hearts.