Page 30 - Simply Vegetables Spring 2022

Plant health
Chances are, until recently, you may never have met a Plant Health and Seeds Inspector. I’m known as “the bug lady” in some garden centres, as “Plant Health” by growers and someone for passing drivers to peer at as I take river water samples in August.
In my second year of a BSc in commercial horticulture I wrote an essay on Xylella fastidiosa, the bacterium killing many olive groves in Italy, which led to an interest in pests and diseases. Then I met Andrew Gaunt, a Plant Health Inspector
in West Sussex when visiting his National Plant Collection of Hedychium (flowering gingers), and he suggested looking on Civil Service jobs. So here I am.
As an agency we inspect for regulated pests and diseases on imported plants, grains and seeds and we certify plants and produce for export; we undertake surveys to prove the negative as well as the positive (more of which later); organise emergency measures in plant health outbreaks; and assist other Defra agencies with outbreaks such as the recent finding of Ips typographus beetles on spruce trees in Kent.
Some question plant health import regulations for individuals more than one person has said that they couldn’t see the problem with bringing a packet of seeds or a cutting of something home from foreign shores (“it’s only small and no one will know”).
Until you learn about hitchhikers – get two Plant Health inspectors together over tea and the tales come thick and fast. Take Bactericera cockerelli, for example, a 1mm psyllid native to Central and North America.
Blueberry leaf
Olive grove in Barri in southern Italy (Source Andrew Gaunt APHA)
It’s one of the most destructive pests of potato and other Solanaceae plants in the western hemisphere. In 2006 it turned up in New Zealand, but researchers aren’t able to say how it found its way there. Hitchhikers often move when someone brings something “small” home. The tiny sap-sucking psyllid has since spread all over the country causing millions of dollars
of crop losses, loss of export markets and increased growing and managing costs to both outdoor and indoor crops.
Hitchhikers can also be imported on one vegetable and move to another. A crop that has recently been added to the UK’s import prohibition list is the mildly sweet and juicy Yacon (Polymnia sonchifolia), a tuberous vegetable from the Andes. Part of the Asteraceae family, it can carry the Potato Yellowing Virus, which has the potential
to infect a range of crops including
potato. The virus is mainly spread by the peach-potato aphid (Myzus persicae), which is widespread in Britain. It’s so dangerous to production that it’s rated
as a top quarantine pest in the European and Mediterranean Plant Protection Organisation region, the Eurasian Economic union, plus Egypt, Russia, Turkey.
Then there are the hitchhikers that arrive in the post. Because the production of tomatoes, aubergine, peppers and chillies is so important for our food security, it is against the law to buy Solanaceae seeds from third countries (which include the US), without them having a phytosanitary certificate. This will prove that the seeds, including the heritage varieties that some gardeners find such a draw, have been correctly tested against the viruses they
30 Simply Vegetables
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