Ever since Jellyman recommended the use of Triazicide I have thought of it as the best synthetic insecticide for the home grower available, because of price, safety, efficacy and convenience. In the past, when a member suggested the product had failed them, I assumed their timing was off or the product had been on the shelf too long. After all, Don Yellman aka Jellyman would have to know something about protecting plums and he lives where PC is a huge issue. But the recent post comparing Imidan to it has me a bit perplexed. The complaint is that Triazicide flat-out doesn’t work.
Imidan is not exactly a convenient product for the home grower to use, is quite poisonous to us mammals (so must be carefully stored and handled) and comes in quantities very inconvenient for the small home orchard keeper (the orchard being small, not the keeper, silly!). I could make a much longer list of reasons not to want to use the stuff, but it isn’t necessary for this discussion.
I’m wondering how many of you have used Triazicide in plum curculio country with success- especially with Euro plums, but also with apples and other fruit attractive to the weevil. Also, I wonder if the label is now recommending a more dilute mix than it used to. There are laws and there are enforceable laws and I will not advise anyone here to break either but if the recommended concentration is inadequate, we should know. At the very least we could start an on-line petition to have them crank up the recommended concentration. Why should a home grower not be allowed to used enough pesticide to kill the pests the label claims to control? There should be a law against selling a product that makes such a false claim.
For the last few days I’ve been scouting orchards sprayed with a commercial pyrethroid- just two sprays, the first when latest apples dropped their petals and the second 10-14 days later. Everything is well protected and looking good, as it has from this program and many orchards for about 5 years now. Clean E. plums along with everything else. Some orchards sprayed with Avaunt or Imidan instead have pear psyla damage as well as cat facing on peaches from plant bugs. Avaunt and Imidan are kinder to certain beneficials but also to these pests. There is always a price to pay. That price is mixing some Assail with the Avaunt or Imidan if you need protection from certain pests.
I’m a commercial applicator and use other pyrethroid products. I bought a bottle of Triazicide once just to see how it worked and it killed some beetles that were decimating my lillys.
Incidentally I’m managing about a hundred orchards in the northeast- mostly within an hour north of NYC but I do consultation for a few quite a bit further north.
Not much help but I have a bottle bought 2013 and one 2016 and they have the same %active and mix.
They have different labels.
My point was that there are a lot of folks (including myself) using it based upon your recommendation.
Further, my personal observations are that it works well if applied at the proper times. I can pull my notes later in this thread but in short I had 2014 with every apple with a PC mark. I did not spray that year until the apples were as big as a marble. (May25) Too late. In 2015 I sprayed at petal fall (about April 25) and again at 2 wk interval x2. Not a single bite. Coincedence? Yup, could be.
Based on the chart of insecticide effectiveness from Penn State I posted a few days ago, the active ingredient in Triazcide is rated a 3 on a scale of 1-4 against PC where 1 is most effective and 4 is the least effective. Sevin is rated a 2 and several other chemicals are rated a 1 including Imidan and several Neonics. Assail is one of Neonics rated a 1. Its active ingredient called acetamiprid is contained on at least one consumer grade insecticide. Wonder if combining these two different classes of insecticide would help?
Other info does not rate Assail so highly for PC. Maybe Olpea will chip in because I believe he has the information handy. He warned me when I was suggesting I might try Assail alone. For a nicinoid it seems to be reasonably bee friendly- not supposed to kill them once it dries.
When I used it in my nursery where I wasn’t really trying to protect apples from PC I got decent but not great protection- for what its worth. It is supposed to be one of the few that has some kick-back, like Imidan. It will kill eggs inside the apple.
I like to use it with Avaunt. That pretty much covers everything with no mite outbreaks.
Yes, I agree. I’m just starting with 20 trees and haven’t got it figured out yet. I’m just trying to work with what
I can buy locally. I tried to share a bag of Imidan with some folks and the deal fell through
The question was whether Triazicide works for you and I’m still gonna have to go on the yes column.
Time will tell.
2015 I used year old Triazicide and my timing was not good. Almost all my plums had PC. This year I sprayed fresh Triazicide at petal fall and twice after that using double concentration and a sticker. About 25% of plums damaged by PC. Apples and Peaches are clean. Due to bad weather I’ve got very little fruit on my trees so I’m not yet convinced Triazicide is effective. I I’ll will try it again next year on my backyard trees.
I used at petal fall and 10 to 14 days later and seem to have it bad on some of my trees. Liberty, Macoun and Granny Smiths the worst. I’ve bagged about 300 hundred apples so far, left the bit ones alone hopefully they’ll scar over and be edible. Cape Cod area.
Looks like the agg colleges disagree - imagine that! I actually use the SE peach spray guide that you linked to. Last year I used Imidan and had some PC but a lot of cat faceing insect problems on peaches. No peaches this year but I had a lot of PC problems on Apples and some plant bug problems after using Assail. Those rascals are hard to kill. I’m going to try Avaunt next year or a combination to see if I can eliminate the PC and the plant bugs
Yes, I was surprised by the suggestion the phosmet was effective against tarnished plant bug because in the years I used it, TPG seemed not to be controlled by it- same with green stink bug. These charts are hard to fathom because they give no indication of the amount of time the chemicals are working but even beyond that I think you have to take them with a grain of salt. I rely more on the consultant that is employed by my chemical supplier. There’s a chance he could steer me to the more expensive product, but because he advises hundreds of commercial growers, he can’t risk endorsing products that don’t work.
Cornell used to suggest that phosmet was not effective against TPB, by the way.
The advisor I mentioned recommends Avaunt to replace Imidan. Commercial fruit growers here are advised to use pyrethroids only for emergency because of the potential for mite outbreaks. Funny, because they almost all use Sevan as part of their thinning program for apples and I’ve had mite outbreaks when I use that for J. Beetles a few times.
When using commercial guidelines it is important to realize that pest pressure in a small orchard is likely to be less than in a hundred to thousand acre monoculture. That is one reason we need to rely on each other for some of our guidance and why I’m concerned about people here not getting results with Triazicide.
I tried Triazicide this year for PC control. It seems to have work well where I gave the trees a good drenching. It is hard to get good coverage on full size trees without a powerful sprayer that can push volume to the distance needed. A few trees that were only misted had some PC damage still. My potted nectarines had zero hits. Apple trees that I didn’t spray were hit unusually hard this year. I think the high heat and humidity we had 2 weeks ago had something to do with that.
I don’t have anything in front of me and need to get going, but years ago it was generally recognized Assail wasn’t super effective against PC. I’ve seen Assail recommended once for PC in the last couple years mainly because if I remember right, the Extension person would rather not have growers using Imidan, or Actara for PC, so felt Assail was the next best thing.
From all I’ve read, overall the consensus seems to be Imidan, Actara, Belay are the real powerhouses for PC control. Imidan is weak on stink bugs. Actara, and Belay are good on stink bugs, but very weak on OFM.
Ortho does offer a consumer version of Assail, but they announced a few months ago they are discontinuing all neonics in their consumer grade insecticides (I can’t remember by what date.) This won’t affect commercial grade Assail, which is manufactured by United Phosphorous.
Don’t know how good my info will be because there is a lot of holes but here goes my experience:
When I lived in the Austin area I had a few peach trees and the PC and I also suspect the OFM destroyed basically all fruit two years in a row. All of it done. I was spraying organic products back then and they did nothing. On a side note there was never any damage to in that area to pears or the few apples I got.
Flash forward to Dallas now. I have grown Nectarine, Peach, and plums, etc. for a few years now. I started using triazicide as sonn as I started growing here in Dallas. For me it has been very effective I think. Three years my trees were outdoors only and no damage using only triazicide. I stated at petal fall and sprayed every tens days and occassionaly had to reapply after hard rains. I would make three to four sprays. I too mixed a little stronger than the label says to. Now my trees spend winter outdoors and are outdoors as much as possible during bloom and are brought into a greenhouse once fruit sets. I think I did two early sprays after petal fall and no damage by bugs. Is it possible the bugs just hadn’t found my outdoor trees yet? Are they unable to get inside my GH? Dunno, lots of holes in my story for sure but that is my experience.
This is the info I was hoping for. Combined with my success here using similar products- where the entire NE pest complex is adequately to completely controlled with a pyrethroid, I feel confident that if you make the batch a bit hot and time it correctly you should be fine. The pyrethroids are very safe compared to OP’s (based on toxicity to animals and the quantity you need to store) and the convenience of being able to buy small quantities makes it the most practical synthetic on the market for the home fruit grower, IMO.
I do lose a percentage of E plums at certain sites, but not enough to really matter as long as I tell my customers to ignore the first fruit that ripens, or at least check it for worms.
I believe you need to buy a new container every season to insure freshness because ot its short shelf life and that if pressure comes during very high heat (100 F.up, maybe) you may need to substitute it with Sevan because its efficacy is said to decline in this type of weather. Sevan may need to be applied on a weekly basis instead of up to bi-weekly because it seems to lose potency on the trees fairly quickly.
All this being said, if you are someone that feels you’ve done everything possible with Triazicide to make it work and you’ve failed to get adequate results, please post your experience. I certainly think that purchasing Imidan to solve your problems is a sound strategy for a serious grower. Personally I’d rather use Avaunt or even Sevan, but it is a personal decision.