Botrytis fruit rot or gray mold, caused by Botrytis cinerea, is a common fruit disease in California strawberries (Koike et al. 2018). Botrytis cinerea has a wide host range infecting several commercially important crops including blueberry (Saito et al. 2016), grapes (Saito et al., 2019), and tomato (Breeze, 2019).
Fungal infection can cause flower or fruit rot. Fruit can be infected directly or through a latent infection in the flowers. Moist and cool conditions favor fungal infections and increased sugar content in the ripening fruit can also contribute to the disease development. Initial symptoms of infection appear as brown lesions and a thick mat of gray conidia is characteristic symptom in the later stages of infection.
As chemical fungicides are primarily used for gray mold control, fungicide resistance is a common problem around the world (Panebianco et al., 2015; Liu et al., 2016; Stockwell et al., 2018; Weber and Hahn, 2019). In strawberry, cultural control options such as removing diseased plant material or using cultivars with traits that can reduce gray mold infections may not be practical when the disease is widespread in the field or cultivar choice is made based on other factors. Non-chemical control options are necessary to help reduce the risk of chemical fungicide resistance, prolong the life of available chemical fungicides, achieve desired disease control, and to maintain environmental health.
Although there are several botanical and microbial fungicides available for gray mold control, limited information is available on their efficacy in California strawberries. A study was conducted in the spring of 2019 to evaluate the efficacy of several chemical, botanical, and microbial fungicides in certain combinations and rotations to help identify effective options for an integrated disease management strategy.