Growing strawberries in the home garden, Disease
Source: University of Minnesota Ext.
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Diseases of strawberries
Gray mold
Gray mold (Botrytis cinerea) is the most common fruit rot disease of strawberries in Minnesota. The disease is most prevalent when there is prolonged cool, wet weather during flowering.
The gray mold fungus overwinters on dead strawberry leaves, infected straw, mummified fruit and weeds.
Infection is most severe in rainy or humid conditions where flowers remain wet for more than 12 hours.
It can begin anywhere on the fruit but is most common on the stem end, where the fruit comes in contact with infected flower parts, or anywhere the fruit is touched by another infected berry.
Infections may attack blossoms, which then do not develop into fruit.
More commonly, infections grow in the young fruit and remain dormant until the fruit begins to ripen.
The fungus rots the fruit and produces powdery, gray spores on the surface of the fruit.
Rot spreads to adjoining berries wherever the healthy and rotten fruit touch.
Fruit remains attached to the plant but dries down to a shriveled mummified berry.
New spores are produced on mummy berries during wet weather.
The gray mold will colonize young leaves and remain dormant within them.
When leaves die naturally, they can become an important source of gray mold spores in the strawberry patch.
Plants damaged by winter injury may develop Botrytis crown rot, where leaf and flower stems rot and turn brown at the point where they attach to the crown of the plant.
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