Aoife O' Driscoll 🧫🧬🦠
@allohexaploid
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🇮🇪 Senior scientist in cereal pathology @niabgroup 🌾🥦 • G x E x M strategies for better disease management 🦠• Happiest in the field 👩🌾• Own Views
Joined February 2010
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New paper from the Eurobarley consortium , with efficacy data from UK and Europe on activity of current azoles, SDHIs, strobs and multi sites against Ramularia, net blotch and brown rust. Thanks to
@BASF
for funding these independent pan-Europe trials🌾🧑🔬
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To the farmer from *a well known dating app* who told me he wasn't sure if we'd get on but could he ask me about the yellow rust in his winter wheat with a resistance score of 9, at 11.30pm on a Saturday night, I salute you 😂👨🏻🌾🌾👩🔬
#AlwaysWorking
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2% of the worlds plastic waste comes from bioscience research. I'm taking small steps at work to eliminate this by moving, where possible to biodegradable pots like these ones made from rice bran. Hard as nails but will degrade naturally in 18 months.
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Allotment dahlias and cosmos still going strong as we whizz into November 🌸💮🏵️🌺🌼
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Did a 12 week not v scientific experiment to try & go plastic free, by shaming myself into keeping every bit & 📸 it at the end of each week. The first few weeks were *awful* but managed to get it down to 1 small bag/week. Its a tough challenge but can be done with patience! ♻️
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2 long days, 6 bacon butties (!), 20 cups of tea, 3 press interviews, 2 presentations, 1 podcast recording, about 19 million conversations about disease 🍄🦠😵.
Aaaand back in my happy place
#allotment
I ❤️
@CerealsEvent
🌾
@niabgroup
team smashed it this year ❤️
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This was the second hardest thing I've done after my PhD, but somehow I've passed 😯😯😯. Greatful to my ADAS colleagues for putting up with my whinging and moaning last year and for being the best tutors ever 💐🎉💐
#OmgOmgOmgIPassed
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Out of office on ✔️
Work phone left at home ✔️
Made it through rigorous border controls ✔️
A whole week of being able to talk in my normal Cork accent and nobody asking me to repeat myself 😍🇮🇪🙌🏻🇮🇪👋🏻😁
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7 weeks to Christmas. Behold the sprout guardian angel and her favourite crop, sent from Ireland to make sure you all have a lovely Christmas dinner free of light leaf spot 😂🤶🎄🌱
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Variety mixtures made it into the Irish
@FarmersJournal
Crop Protection Magazine 👍🏻🇮🇪. Nice to see diversity in topics (even if a Marmite one!) and to write as 100% Irish with a UK perspective on things 👩🌾👩🔬
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Something tells me a soil scientist has done a big book drop into the RSPCA bookshop in Cambridge 🤔📚👩🏼🔬
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Committed the Holy Grail of conference sins: one large glass of wine, a double G&t and a 4 course meal the night before delivering an hour long deep dive talk into wheat disease management 😳🍸🍷😳🌾
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Nobody tells you when you're young that a career in research actually involves a significant amount of time procuring random objects such as drainpipe, plant pot saucers, tiles and 100s of yoghurt pots that are *just the right size*.
*Yoghurt pots still to be procured 👀
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Made proper Irish turnip lanterns. None of this smiley pumpkin business. 💀🎃
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Still trying to work out whether to respond to panicky messages from the field with a thesis-long paragraph on quantitative genetics, gene for gene interactions and fungal epidemiology
_or_
with a ‘Don’t worry just apply x keep an eye on it and it���ll be grand’ 🤷🏼♀️🤦🏼♀️😩
#Rusty
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Had a bright idea this morning to 'just go and run' my first half marathon without any prep or eating beforehand 🤦🏼♀️🤢. There's a reason people train and compete in actual races😱!
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Any other plant pathologists/entomologists looking out the window thinking 'ooooh minus 5 tonight that will knock populations back in the spring'.
Just me? Ok....
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Klopp proves time and time again why he's someone I'd love to have a pint with. Integrity always ⚽️🌹
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This week’s panicky messages consist mostly of leaf 2s that look like this (or far worse 🤦🏼♀️)
No it’s not nodorum/ascochyta/stress. It’s just good old fashioned septoria doing its thing✅. Most cases a result of mismatched T1s relative to varietal resistance rating. Happy Friday!
Still trying to work out whether to respond to panicky messages from the field with a thesis-long paragraph on quantitative genetics, gene for gene interactions and fungal epidemiology
_or_
with a ‘Don’t worry just apply x keep an eye on it and it’ll be grand’ 🤷🏼♀️🤦🏼♀️😩
#Rusty
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Hard not to cry watching that. So lucky to still be here to tell his story ☀️
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Nervous/excited/a bit overwhelmed to be invited to NZ this August, leading a week of IPM workshops as part of
@FARarable
’s latest crop protection initiative; A Lighter Touch. 🇳🇿👩🌾🚜🥝
The FAR website events page is looking pretty chocka with events, take a look and save the dates!
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Jesus, Mary and Joseph and the wee donkey etc...
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Two ☀️days on some cracking farms with tip top people and gorgeous crops👌🏼🥰. Plus; little brother Adrian's first visit to a farm, he loved it 🥹. His main observation; 'They are obsessed with yield and profit' He is not wrong 😅😅😅.
Here is to a good harvest🌾
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'Studying' for BASIS = Sunday in the pub identifying weeds 🌿
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Finally reached the point of the year where the allotment replaces the veg box for a few months 🍓🍒🥬🧄
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Last field visit of the year and as a bonus treat my pathologists eye spotted a smidgin of white blister on mustard (Albugo candida), an obligate pathogen *and* an oomycete. The purple colouring is much more stark here than on dark green veg Brassicas where its a real pain 🥦
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So pleased we put these bicrop plots in
@CerealsEvent
🥰😍. Variety/seed rate recipes procured from Twitter/Farmers Weekly articles. Would make a few tweaks next year but trial, error and improvement is whats its all about 🌾👌🏼
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Fully
@niabgroup
branded at the Formula one, accompanying racing-mad 19 year old little sis 😍 👯♀️
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Tell me you are in Ireland, without telling me you are in Ireland 🇮🇪🐷🍴
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Shout out to every person who has tried and failed to pronounce my name on a Teams call/at an event. You are
#seen
🤣😎
Irish names were found to be the among the words we have most difficulty pronouncing. The hardest of all is the name Aoife, which generated 111,000 Google searches on how to say it over the course of the year
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With all of the U.K's problems I feel very lucky to live in a country with free healthcare. Two A&E trips plus GP this week; short waiting times, kind staff plus free meds & sling for my wrist. A&E would be minimum 8 hour wait in Ireland and have cost me over €400.
❤️ the NHS ❤️
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@WallySierk
Colours are wrong. Most British people might offer you something to eat out of politeness. Most Irish people will force feed you Mrs Doyle style, and send you off with a tupperware of something for the journey home even if that's across the road.
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Compulsory mask wearing giving me the chance to don Star Wars themed accessories in my 30s. How could you NOT want to wear one?! 🤯🚀.
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For the first time today I had the 'Welcome, is it Miss/Mrs?' introduction and my male colleague said 'actually it's Doctor' 🔥🔥🔥
#FeelingSeen
#IWD
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Missing the mothership that much I've started sublimal dressing 🇮🇪🇮🇪🇮🇪🇮🇪🇮🇪
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Running out of coffee before an 8am meeting, Internet not working, a flat tyre and then falling off my chair while presenting during a Zoom call is peak
#January
😔
#JustGoBackToBed
😒
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Soooo glad to be out in the field again after a long winter indoors 🥰. Fabulous septoria pressure at our
@niabgroup
Hampshire site this morning 😍. Leaf 2s out in forward varieties. Not a smidge of rust to be seen🤔but a long way to harvest 🌾
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Taking urban farming to the next level 🏠🌾
A farmer in the Polish city of Lublin has refused to sell his land to developers. Here he is harvesting his crops last week in the middle of a housing estate.
Via Igor Gorczyca on FB:
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Spotted at
@AHDB_Cereals
event today; shiny new and updated FRAG guidelines for 2023 in print 👌🏼 timely w/2 new actives on the way ➡️. Pick up a hard copy at your next AHDB event 🤓
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Fab day setting up the first round of trapping at
#StrategicFarmEast
@The_Barker_Boys
looking at the impact of flowering strips on enhancing beneficials/presence of slugs and impacts on BYDV. Even in October there is plenty of life & colour present 🐛🐞🐌
@AHDB_Cereals
@niabgroup
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Get you a work colleague like
@niabjohn
, who leaves gifts 🎁 of ergot infected blackgrass on my desk to add to the collection 😘😍. He knows the route to my heart 😂♥️
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With a surge in spring cropping expected in 2024, I'm leading a very timely training session tomorrow on practical management and IPM for bicrops and variety mixtures. What would be your
#1
TOP TIP for anyone embarking on this journey in the spring?
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My love for salad onion crops has further deepened by discovering this variety is called Yoda 🙈🙈🙈
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When the brown rust has run out of yummy green leaf tissue in May and has to start feeding on the stems in June 🦠🤤🍴. Ears in July? 🌾
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Q. Can you grow a decent crop of Zyatt in a high yellow rust pressure area without having to go through with the sprayer 5 times in a season? Maybe even.....Zero fungicide?😲
A. Pathologist me says likely, agronomist me says we've got a way to go until harvest, so let's see 🧐🌾
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Fave time of year at the allotment. Lucky to have neighbours with vines 🍇😍
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July autocasted into standing spring wheat stubble and not a beetle to be seen. A fine looking sight!
#CrossYourFingers
#osr
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Ahead of my field team disease I.D. training tomorrow my wonderful friend Pete Gladders has come up trumps again for a suite of material. Is it disease or is it just yellowing? Pest damage or disease? All will be revealed tomorrow, & some use of my fave programme, Distrain :)
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Some of the comments from men in the below are disgusting. The point is the normalisation, from a young age, that it’s ok for girls to be viewed as (& view themselves) as ’sluts’ & ok for boys to treat them as such. This ‘fun’ behaviour is SO damaging when navigating adulthood.
Farmers Weekly has seen photographs of girls at the DIY events with “slut” written on their arms and “free head” written on their foreheads.
Slogans on club t-shirts included: “I can run faster horny than you can scared".
READ MORE:
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Celebrating 10 months of staying in by wearing all the sequins. Happy New Year and well done to everyone who made it this far! You did it! 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟
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Oh hi look there's me in the
@ACTvegfarmer
yearbook talking about (one of) my favourite things-getting biopesticides to work in the field! 4 pages worth of nice pictures of vegetables and my musings 🥦🥒🌽🥕🥔 (thanks
@ShanHalpin132
for sending
@roseheather1
for interviewing ☺️
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@CatharineHoey
@michaelgove
It's not really a 'card'. Ye nabbed 6 of our counties. Now ye are complaining about the repercussions of that. If there are concerns about attacks on independence perhaps don't attack other countries in the first place.
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Late night escape to the allotment after another week of challenging events 🧘🏼♀️💆🏼♂️. Hugged folk I hadn't seen in years at Groundswell and got tons of free wildflower seed for our community orchard 🌺. Drained but buzzing 🐝
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Enjoyed a bit of tan spot with septoria co-infections, plus some proper barley disease in Denmark yesterday 😍🇩🇰🌾
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🙈🙈🙈🙈🙈
Really great to catch up with Aoife
@niabgroup
@CerealsEvent
and listen to her forward thinking plans for future research - exciting times ahead
#biostimulants
#biologicals
#blends
#regenag
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Poor journalism on crop protection from
@BBCCountryfile
tonight 😑. A focus on all the bad with about 30 secs on the good (genetics, dss, tech) 🤦🏼♀️. You want pesticide free, GM free food thats affordable and good for soil structure/health? Dream on. One has to give.
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Ascochyta symptoms. Send a sample into
@niabgroup
Lab Test if you're not sure whether it's disease, scorch or stress.
Proving to be a vintage year for Ascochyta in wheat. Loads of it around and hard to get a correct I.D in the field. It's *Not* Zymo! 🤔😵💫🫠
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How it started (9th Oct 2020) vs how its going (9th Sept 2021)
Took me ~two minutes to find 18 different species in this flower margin 💮🏵️🌸
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Dug the last of the overwintered beetroots up and gave the raspberries their annual haircut, feed and blanket ☺️😌. Still not sure if we have summer or autumn fruiting 🤷🏼♀️🤔. Nice to be back out 👩🌾
#allotment
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When you're working from home to get stuff done but your office buddy keeps wanting to chat 🙄🙄🙄
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Clearly not a plant scientist.
Only in films do people leaving their jobs carry a box with a plant pot in it.
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Really glad we popped to see the
@niabgroup
plots
@CerealsEvent
today after the stress of April and May. Everything (I believe) is performing as you’d expect given the year. Come and see our stand for a really great stress test of crop genetics and chemistry this season!
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Right then, out of office on until 1st July 🌽🌱👩🏼🌾
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How it started vs how its going
@The_Barker_Boys
🐝 They were so happy in their nests they even made some wax 😍🐝
#LeafCutterBees
#StrategicFarmEast
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Ran 100 miles this month and saw some nice things along the way. What January blues?!
@REDJanuaryUK
@MindCharity
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No trip to Clon is complete without a visit to the finest zero waste/refill shop in the whole of Ireland aka Scallys Supervalu Clonakilty ♻️
@ScallySupervalu
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My new social media obsession is called TSheep; following everyone's ups and downs using grazing as a replacement for T0, PGRs and various other inputs 🐏🐑🌾😍
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Despite having an elusively rare and productive week, it's good to be reminded of this 👩🏼💻
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I haven't done a food waste collection from Pret for
@OLIO_ex
in a while; now I'm reminded of the waste there is from food outlets every night! 45 lunches/dinners from Cambridge Station Pret redistributed on the Olio app tonight, the rest going into work tomorrow 🥙🧆🥗
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Sometimes as biologists we get so entwined in the *biology* of our experiments we lose sight of setting them up in the best way to achieve statistically powerful results. Really enjoyed this paper on improving statistical power to reduce Type 1 & 2 errors.
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Reviewing my first manuscript for Plant Pathology. Does this make me a grown up scientist now🤔
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If you've been stuck on Zoom for 20 months, speaking to four trailer loads of people in a field with no mic, slides, props or prep (!) is probably a good way to get back into it 🤦🏼♀️. Am sensing huge amounts of energy that needs unleashing 🤣👩🏼🌾👩🏼🔬
Hedges and wildflower margins
@The_Barker_Boys
@niabgroup
@allohexaploid
@GWCT
#Research
@SyngentaCropsUK
#Data
#environmental
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My new favourite crop: Belgian endive. The roots are grown in the ground (like sugar beet) in year 1. Then taken out and put into the cold store where they are 'forced' (kind of like rhubarb) to produce the green leaf material. So weird as it's an Asteraceae (lettuce family).
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Pretty pleased with the allotment rye which reached 5ft 10' in a mix this year. 5ft 3' person included for scale 🌾👩🏼🌾
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My elderly Italian allotment neighbour is growing borlotti beans and I can't get over how stunning they are 😍😍😍
#NewNIABBreedingProgram
#BorlottiBeans
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A certain retired and v wise pathologist used to say to me at every 'new' hair brained idea I had: 'Did that in the 80s, didn't work'. Unearthing old papers on topical subjects, I wonder how much we are repeating ourselves, *or* looking at old problems with a new perspective?
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What's the point of extra wealth if you can't get an ambulance for 9 hrs and your private hospital isn't equipped to treat you, there's noone to collect your bins, fix the potholes, deliver your Ocado order, and you're living in a chronically ill, unsafe & undereducated society🤔
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Asparagus season 😍. Lunch later courtesy of John Chinn and the Chinn family
@CobreyFarms
in the beautiful Wye Valley. My second fave perennial crop after rhubarb
#BritishAsparagus
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Normal person: ''ewww this pomegranate is rotten throw it out''.
Plant disease person:' 'oooooh look at those lovely fungal structures'' while munching on pomegranate 🙈
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On Weds or Sat I do deliveries for local food banks in Stamford Hill. There is usually some beautiful living salad or herbs. Today I got some leftover variegated chard & some Osmin purple basil. Plugs intact, should stay alive if potted? How nice is this for struggling families❤️
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Allotment glut fatigue is peak
#firstworldproblems
🥵. You know it’s bad when you start craving cotton wool white bread at the sight of *another* tomato or raspberry😭🍞
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And just like that, my last week at
@ADASGroup
is over. When I said I didn't want any leaving lunches or do's, I didn't think a virus would make my wish come true! 2.5 weeks off now before starting my new job
@niabgroup
& I'm v sad that I can't go home to see my family.
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How it started (November) versus how its going (today!). With the orchard and perennials about to go in at the back 🍒🍏🥦🌿
#Allotment
#CouchGrassIsOurEnemy
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One of my favourite smells is the turn from spring to summer in Cambridge: cycling in dry heat, wisteria in bloom, cows out to graze, allotments and roadside verges awake and thriving 💕🌸🌺🌷🌻🌼
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''Are you enjoying being back in the office Aoife''
''Yes yes it's just great I finally got to lay out all my fruit and veg shaped stress balls after months in storage'' 🤷🏼♀️
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'' Sorry I can't do xyz I'll be too busy making coleslaw and sauerkraut for the next few weeks'' 🥬
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Lots of people feeling inspired after a week of
#Ag
events. One take home message for me was that if a man with a Guinness World Record for wheat yield believes in mixtures and blends for managing your risk, we are probably onto something.....🌾
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Co-authored the new and revised vegetable Brassica disease management guide for
@AHDB_Hort
and the final polished version looks fab! Thanks to everyone who contributed pics, comments and took time to review. Too many to mention in 140 characters 🥦🥦🥦
Our latest best-practice guide covers the 13 main diseases of brassicas that cause economic losses to growers in the UK.
To download it, visit .
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Annual Xmas long run done ✅
Trough of presents I sent back to my gang in Ireland arrived ✅
Sprouts peeled, red cabbage on ✅
Time to tuck into my hamper from the best work crew
@niabgroup
Merry Christmas to all the stranded vagrants out there today, buckets of love 🤶☃️🦌🎄🎅
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A bright way to start Thursday: 50 beautiful bunches of flowers from Tesco, designated as 'waste' and destined for the bin. Brought half into work and the rest distributed on the
@OLIO_ex
app 🌻🌹🌷💮🥀🌼💐🌺🌸
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My small urban back garden is now basically a single squash plant. Quite the growth in one month.
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What do plant pathologists gift other plant pathologists? Disease susceptible barley varieties, obviously 🌾😅.
Taken from allotment trials to be planted in 2023 allotment trials. Apparently it gets good ergot 😁😁😁
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First of our open days in Hampshire today covering all things IPM, ➡️cultural controls ➡️varieties & of course fungicides! I’ll be showcasing our work tackling fungicide resistance in the wider environment & monitoring for newly emerging virulence 🦠🧬🌾
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