Bugs in fruit

I finally have apples, pears, peaches, plums and nectarines after 4 years. However, every fruit has a bug in it and the leaf footed bugs are still around eating my mulberries, blueberries and pears.

Is this just the normal here in N. Florida so i better get use to eating bugs?

I already got rid of my blackberries and raspberries due to insects and disease.

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Thats plum curicilio most likely. They get mine also, going to have to start spraying unfortunately, because my attempt at surround clay this year didn’t work very well. Very hard for me to get it to coat anything but peaches (which it doesn’t coat them perfectly) but it repels right off plums pluots apples and pears for me.

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Well, once you see the damage, the larvae are already in the fruit and most sprays won’t touch them. My trees have yet to reach full bloom. I hung my codling moth trap yesterday, so I’m counting down to biofix.

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Sorry I meant in the future, not today.

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I am in SW AR and could not raise a tree borne fruit without a regular spray schedule

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Wow, I sometime dream of growing in FLA. All that lush tropical fruit. But you got it bad there!

I get some bugs in my fruit, but nothing like that in all the fruit. It is just the odd fruit here or there with a borer. I cut around them and eat the rest of the fruit if it is minor damage.

Good luck with figuring it out!

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I tried surround several times and got very poor results. I went to the Home Orchard Education Center and saw they also used surround several times in a few months. They also had way more coddling moth damage than I would find acceptable. So I figured maybe the product actually isn’t that great unless you apply it every couple weeks?

I have, however, had excellent results heavily thinning and immediately bagging fruit. I have approximately 100 trees, mostly dwarf, a few semi dwarf, and it takes me about 3 weeks to do.

This one didn’t get thinned enough, and it’s a weirdly stubby little tree, so it looks rather comical, like a kid teepeed it. UPS man was shaking his head going down the driveway.

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Yeah I should do that also, I have the bags, just as you said you have to do it immediately basically.

Here coddling moth shows up in the first half of May. I still have 2 trees to do, and it’s kinda late to be doing them. But in prior was even later, so I guess I am doing all right. One thing about thinning and bagging: you really get to know your trees as individuals. I have about 100, and a few of them are starting to feel like pets to me. We have a relationship after a few years of being together! :rofl:

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I tried bagging one year, the squirrels appreciated it. Surround ended up being the best solution in my case, especially against PC.

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How did you get it to stick to plums/pluots etc

It kinda sticks to the peaches but really tough to coat them, impossible for tje others as it repels right off. Also as others mentioned it clogged my sprayer pretty quickly and often.

Sadly I couldn’t say. Apples and peaches are my focus. My nectarine and cherries are the nearest i get to plum. My nectarine gets brown rot down to the last fruit so i dont worry about good coverage on it. I do an odd thing later in the season for my peaches that I’ve noticed does adhere the surround to smooth fruit like the nectarine. I do a thin coat of surround with nufilm as a base coat. Then once that is dry ill go back and do a normal coat of surround with whatever else im doing in that period and get decent coverage. It seems to chalk off like a normal coating. My objective is to lay it thick enough to hide the peaches from the birds as they ripen vs my usual curculio mitigation so i can’t tell you if it would work in your use case but its worth trying. For the clogging issue I’ve found multiple thinner coats work well but the tradeoff is time. Especially since it needs to dry between coats. Plus side, trees look like ghosts so on nights with a full moon its pretty surreal.