God Bless Texas wrote


I certainly won't argue with Ted, even through a proxy, but I've been
given to understand that burning the wood kills the spores. We have
cut a bunch of dead oak, and our extension agent has told us that it's
OK to burn it - it can't pass the infection that way.

It was the "incomplete" burning that I mentioned as a problem,
complete incineration kills the spores. Also, given that this was
some years ago when Ted was the county agent it could have been a
speculative hypothesis as to why Oak Wilt suddenly became such a
problem in the Hill Country, and not a statement of fact
A couple of Oak Wilt sites I looked at mentioned that underground
root to root infestation accounted for 90% of the infections of Oaks.
Problem is I can't locate the original source of this information and
how it was ascertained. Something to watch out for on the net ( and
in gardening journalism in general ) is the ease with which
information becomes self reinforcing.

A question I've been puzzling over as far as the epidemiology is
concerned is:
If the large majority of infections are root to root what accounts
for the break out and movement of the disease into new areas in recent
years ?

Now if it would just stop raining I could get away from hanging out
on the computer looking at pics of Oak Wilt and do some gardening.

Steve Coyle
www.austingardencenter.com