I believe I have a borer problem. What is the best way to deal with this? The pictures are after I scraped a large blob of sticky sap and pulled back the mulch.
Also, I’m apparently terrible at taking pictures. I’ll try to get something less riddled with failure tomorrow.
I know this is an old conversation, but I saw a couple posts about the same. I have been plagued by peach borer problems, but I am much more responsive now and set about taking some steps for treatment and prevention. I do get out the hanger or paper clip and dig until I find a borer. Since reading Michael Phillips pretty religiously, I open up my cold pressed neem oil and spread a chunk onto the area, spreading it like butter, and trying to get it into the hole. I also spray the trunk and base with 1% neem oil, making sure to let it puddle about the base. I have moved my mulch back away from the trunk and added a circle of pea gravel. I did have one tree that appears to have had a borer get by me and overwintered in the trunk. I was so focused on the fruit, that I failed to see what was happening underneath the bark. I scraped away all the soft diseased bark and placed 100% neem over the entire area, making sure to get in any openings. Cross your fingers, but its holding its own so far. Hopefully, these measures will decrease the issues I have had in the past. It seems to be working!
A 5 gallon bucket of spinosad worked really well for me. I manually dug them out or atleast squished em then I did one treatment followed with a neem brushing like @scottfsmith shows and then missed my spinosad reapplication and applied beneficial nematodes later in the year and so far i have not seen them again (2 years)
Thanks, have thought about spinosad but havent got there yet. I will give it a try.
Richard. I did look up some information about spinosad. I think I was confusing it with Bt. I have honey bees and it seems they aren’t compatible. I appreciate the informationn though.
I also have multiple kinds of bees and do not want to use anything to harm them and would like to get people to use things that dont harm bees or any other pollinator or beneficial insects. Spinosad has to be sprayed on bees or on blossoming flowers to affect bees. Soil applications do not harm the bees and spinosad is not systemic in the plant. The negative is its owned by Monsanto but in general is much less harmful than many other alternatives. Another negative is they only sell spinosyn A and D which are bacteriums that do not reproduce on there own so it needs to be continually applied to be effective.
Spinosad replaces Imidacloprid or the lambda-cyhalothrin (pyrethroid) or piperonyl butoxide all of these are the usual pesticides for borers and directly affect bees which is why i reccomend spinosad to replace them.
If you want to go completely natural you should use HB or SC nematodes for the Borers. Sadly doing nothing will most likely kill or massively shorten the life of your peach tree.
I don’t currently own honeybees but I have in the past. Concerns about their safety is always on my mind. An alternative could be @scottfsmith neem oil treatment for borer control. I mostly used a trunk/graft spray consisting of neem/water and when used regular appears to be a deterrent.
To add a few bits here, I think I have 4-5 years experience with the neem treatment and feel my problem is solved. But I do re-apply neem every year around the time the moths emerge (May in my area). Now I use a mix of equal parts raw neem oil, sesame oil, and raw linseed oil. This mix does not cake when cold like neem and it adds up to a cheaper price since neem is relatively more expensive. I had some problems with small seedling peaches getting infected, I was skipping them but now I coat everything even small seedlings. They seem to come through OK. I only do stone fruits though, no apples and the like.
Dow (or Corteva Agriscience now). No idea if they’re any better than Monsanto though…
I think we should ask these 15 billionaires why they did not make the largest agricultural monopoly in history news
Thanks for the info!! I currently use 100% cold pressed neem applied as a paste directly on the site. I had considered that applying spinosad in the late evening with the bees are not active and only on the base might be a workable idea. Different texts have different information about the risk and the one I was using was pretty firm on their precaution. I appreciate the guidance and especially the specific information.
