About turn

Well, the second of my detached leaf inoculations had an equally high failure rate to the first try despite doubling the concentration of the inoculum and meticulous set up and monitoring. I have come to the conclusion that this may be due to the state of the plants I took the leaves from, I guess they are just heading into winter and the leaves are thickened and suberised, and although the preliminary experiment I did in early September to trial the method had a 100% success rate this has not worked in the full scale set up I began in October. It's rather frustrating. I will now try dipping whole leaves to see what happens, if this still doesn't work I may just have to put this off until the growing season begins next year.

In other projects I am trying to make inoculum for the farm experiment but that is proving tricky once again, even though I thought I had nailed a method which would work. Never mind. I am going to trial an agar inoculation method now to see if that might be more reliable. Since for this research the objective is to study the epidemic not the infection process so in theory it shouldn't make much difference how I inoculate so long as infection occurs.