Clean peaches show brown rot or other diseases a few days after picking.
This topic was discussed years ago on the old garden website. @rayrose suggested keeping them refrigerated. Someone else said he would try a hydrogen peroxide bath or a rum bath but never reported results.
Since the peaches will be used within a week of picking a organic or safe synthetic with a 0 or 1 day PHI would be best.
Anyone have a good solution.
This is one reason why I started to use synthetics for rot control… I never found a solution to this issue other than using them fast. The way I would do that is to cut them up, add a touch of sugar for preservative, and put in the fridge. They would last a week or so that way. You can serve directly or cook later or freeze.
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Perhaps you can try a hydrogen peroxide dip and report the results for us. I would do it on half and leave the other half untreated as control. Let them sit to dry after dipping.
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Not sure if you saw my thread a couple weeks ago, but my peaches were getting brown rot just as they ripened and I asked if anyone thought it would help to do a last minute captan spray. I had gotten lazy on spraying in recent weeks and it looked like I was going to pay for it in brown rot loss. There was some debate over what the Pre-harvest Interval was but @mamuang cited a good source showing it was 0.
Anyway, I did give most of my peaches a final Captan Spray and made myself wait 3 days to be safe. Keep in mind that before that, every peach that had big bird pecks or insect damage or was starting to rot for any reason had started showing the ugly brown fuzz of brown rot. After my last minute spray, it absolutely made a huge difference! I still had a few odd peaches here and there with brown rot, but those could have just been missed. I had one tree in back of my orchard that I just flat forgot to spray that last time and it had brown rot on most of its ripe peaches. There was a BIG difference. This held even after harvest if I picked ripe peaches and left them a day or so no brown rot formed on them either.
I’ve forgotten if you are strictly organic, but if not, I strongly encourage you to try Captan on the peaches that don’t yet have brown rot. You’d probably even be ok doing it the day before you pick them but I gave mine 3 days to be safe.
In fact, this worked so well that I started to wonder if I could, in the future, get away with ONLY spraying fungicide at ripening time. Probably not or everyone would do it that way. I had sprayed my peaches several times this year with Captan and Myclobutinyl both, so its likely that the Brown Rot wasn’t as prevalent as it would have been if I hadn’t sprayed a fungicide several times earlier in the year.
All this is to say that you might consider a last minute Captan Spray to combat your brown rot problem on picked peaches. It helped a LOT with mine.
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I take the opposite approach, I add a rot preventative to many of my spring sprays since I am already spraying, and that pretty much eliminates the rot. For example my Satsuma plum is ripening now, and the last spray I did on it was in early June. Of many hundreds of fruits only a couple on the whole tree are rotting and they are damaged ones which I can easily pick off. They also don’t rot once they are inside. I had some Shiro’s sitting on the counter for weeks and if they had no damage they still did not rot.
The commercial folks take your approach @thecityman so it is certainly a good one. I like how I don’t need to do any extra sprays though since I am just adding it to the OFM/PC/… tank.
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I did use Propiconazole but that was not good enough. Most of my Redhaven looked ok until a few days after I picked them. I did pick early because the catbirds where pecking them. 20% of them were ok 5 days later but the rest where damaged.
I didn’t eliminate the post-harvest rot until I started adding a rot preventative to every tank in the spring. Also I switched from propiconazole to Indar/Elevate, not sure if that was a factor or not. Or maybe it just took a couple years for the total amount of rot spores to decrease in my orchard.
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Very interesting. I usually do mostly what you do. In other words, I just mix my rot preventative into my OFM/PC sprays in spring and early summer. In fact, I did it this year. But I usually keep using both until about 2 weeks before harvest and it prevents most brown rot. This year I stopped about a month before harvest an brown rot was happening.
I’m sure you’ve said it 100 times, but can you remind me what your usual brown rot spray is? I use both captan and Myclobutanil which I know is somewhat redundant but it works and doesn’t cost much. Do you use either? Indar?
Yum. That is exactly what I do with most of the peaches I buy at a local orchard. I have a mixture of ‘Fruit Fresh’ and sugar - and sprinkle it liberally!
You know . . . I probably would come out WAY ahead if I just bought all of my peaches from that orchard, instead of trying to grow my own! (Like @thecityman’s paw paw - I probably have two $600 peach trees!)
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If you look at one of the standard charts like
http://ipm.ucanr.edu/PMG/r5902111.html
it shows Captan as ++, myclo as +++. It definitely helps to use one of the ++++ rated sprays like Indar or propiconazole. I use a combo of Indar and Elevate. Elevate only gets +++ on this chart but it gets ++++ on some other charts.
VERY VERY helpful! Thanks, Scott!
For some reason I can’t buy Myclobutanil in 32oz size or smaller in NY. So backyard growers are discouraged from using it. I don’t know why.