So, I bought a backpack sprayer. Just want to get some feedback from some pics and process. I wanted to spray the cherries (CJ,R,J) and apples with Surround/Spinosad until shuck split - then the rain and wind came. It was either too windy or raining and had to wait - but kept looking for damage and saw none until I found it (pic 1) - PC in the left/middle and not sure on the cherry on the right?
I also found something I do not recognize on the cherries, unless it is just an anomaly in the fruits (pic 2) - any ideas? Lastly, I sprayed with 3c/2oz/gal S/S and got this kind of coverage (pic 3). If the pic is clear enough, is this what I am looking for. And of course it had to rain last night with none in the forecast when spraying in the morning!
What kind of continued build-up am I looking for? Would I add to this coverage in a week (minus the Spinosad) or wait until a heavy rain washes much of it off?
Thanks for any input - Hope all of your efforts are going well!
I checked my local yearly water report. PH averaged 7.2 over 84 tests but min and max was 6.9 and 8.0. So it can vary significantly. It’s a good idea to check it before spraying. The few times I checked it was 7.2.
Edit: automatic system is set to 7.5. Sometimes it’s not working right and they switch to manual adjustment therefore the swings in readings.
@Rouse,
In the first pic, you are right the cherry on the left and middle had PC marks. For the one on the right, my guess was it got munched on by one of those leaf rollers.
Your Surround spray appeared good. Hope you sprayed underneath and inside well, too. If it rains heavily, you can see that the whiteness will fade considerably. That’s when it’s time to re-spray.
Might have to remove our Saturn peach. It had bad rot two years in a row a few seasons ago, and I trimmed the tree severely. We had no peach harvest at all last year due to a late frost/freeze. This spring the Saturn put out quite a few blossoms, and things looked good with little donuts developing nicely. But with all the rain we’ve had until four days ago, every one of the peaches but one on the Saturn tree developed brown rot. There is some rot on some of our other peach trees, including Contender, but nothing like the Saturn. Using the sour grapes excuse, I never much liked the taste of the Saturn peaches anyway – all sugar and little peach flavor.
This is the first year I’ve had brown rot on my contender peaches, but it is also the first year I kept a good crop on the tree instead of in the bellies of squirrels. I kept a pretty good layer of surround on the tree until a few weeks back, for circulios, but also to deter the cicadas. I’m curious if anyone has found a correlation between surround and brown rot. Does the clay on the fruit provide a good place for rot to start? I didn’t think contender was too bad with brown rot, but it is on almost every peach on the tree.
Saturn is a bad rotter. I removed it about 10 years ago.
These days with Indar I could grow it again. I personally like the flavor a lot but I have other similar peaches now so have not re-added Saturn.
@zendog I don’t think Surround has anything to do with brown rot. My guess is it takes awhile for a colony of rot to develop and with more peaches hanging on longer you have the critical mass of spores now. In future years you might need to use a synthetic like Indar. Either that or a whole lot of sulfur.
This is the first year since I began using Indar that I’ve lost control of brown rot on a tree. It is my Silver Gem nectarine, which came out of winter with much less vigor than normal or compared to nearby nectarines of other varieties. The brown rot strikes the fruit and immediately kills the shoots the fruit is attached to and Indar combined with Captan AND Pristine cannot seem to get it under control. It is possible that brown rot in my orchard has developed resistance to Indar, but unlikely since it hasn’t affected other trees in the same way, although I am pulling off more rotten fruit than normal.
In my own orchard I spray with Indar, and/or Pristine and Captan every 2 weeks just to get pretty fruit to show off to potential customers. Most of the orchards I manage only receive one or two summer fungicide sprays in total and have been managed like this for as long as 25 years and so far I haven’t seen similar problems.
The fruit is small and relatively poor quality anyway so I’m probably going to cut the tree down. I grafted the variety to very healthy and vigorous peach trees that have been providing me with more fruit of very high quality than I need. I also have Goldust peaches with high brix and mediocre Glenglos that are providing me with plenty of fruit to give away right now.
Has worked for me just fine. Even more effective is if you use a combination of methods to keep the tree healthy, tho. Good sanitation practices for one, as someone mentioned. Cutting off infected branches and leaves and dead and diseased fruit and cleaning up all the fallen, diseased fruit from under the tree – that’s half the battle. DON’T COMPOST ANYTHING THAT HAS HAD BROWN ROT ON IT. Throw away in trash or burn it and use the ash for growing edible mushrooms. Clean your pruners in between cuts so you don’t infect other branches that are healthy. Give your tree room to breathe. I cut down two mulberry trees because they were shading my cherry tree from sunlight (yes, sunlight is a good fungus killer because it keeps the tree dry). What I also found worked for me (I live in Z5b) is using a weak solution of full fat organic acidophilus milk and water (mix in a spray bottle) in between copper fungicide treatments. And really, if you want to be preventative, hit up your tree with dormant or horticultural oil in late winter/early spring. That doesn’t kill the brown rot, but if you have fewer sucking insects creating wounds and exposing internal cells to monilinia, your tree will reward you with fruit that isn’t easily succumbing to brown rot. Believe me, I learned the hard way one year. Had a sour cherry tree with its first legit harvest. Two days of rain and then a day of temps in 90s with humidity to match (late July) and those dark rubies were mummies by the time I got back after a long weekend. Oh, and I don’t know if this helped but I don’t think it hurt at all. Soil drench with willow bark mixture from time to time. My theory is that the salicylic acid helped with my tree’s immunity.
Fungicides can be effective in controlling brown rot. First, spray copper- containing products during delayed dormant to provide slight suppression of brown rot. Next, apply sulfur or sulfur-containing fungicides. Newer research shows that sulfur mixed with Surround WP Crop Protection is controlling brown rot better than sulfur alone.
Azomite is a micronized sulfur plus basalt rock dust mixture that could be used as an alternative material for brown rot control. If sulfur is used
during high temperatures (>80 degrees Fahrenheit), fruit russeting and
yield reduction may occur. Sulfur applications within 14 days of an oil
application are potentially poisonous to the plant (phytotoxic).
A few questions/thoughts:
1.) Would a delayed dormant spray of lime sulfur be just as efficacious as copper—perhaps more so?
2.) My brief internet search didn’t turn up much of the “newer research” mentioned above, but it does seem that a mixture of Surround + sulfur is commonly recommended for brown rot control in organic spray programs. (And you gotta do something about the curculios anyhow!)
3.) I found the Azomite recommendation rather confusing. Azomite rock dust itself does not seem to contain much sulfur. Is this a typo or outright error? Did the author mean to recommend a mixture of micronized sulfur and Azomite in order to cut or buffer the sulfur and therefore decrease phytotoxicity at higher temperatures? In any case, I don’t understand how Azomite could possibly have any fungicidal properties—unless it’s because it serves as a mechanical barrier to spores. Even so, wouldn’t a kaolin preparation like Surround do a better job of this?
(Of course, the author recommends stopping Surround after “the 1-inch diameter stage of fruit development because the product leaves heavy residue that weathers very slowly”—which would probably be more of a concern to commercial growers than home orchardists. In fact, some of the literature I’ve read—e.g., Schlabach’s Backyard Fruit Production—recommends spraying sulfur + Surround on stone fruit from “set to harvest.”)
4.) On the topic of sulfur at high temperatures and mixing/buffering: is sulfur + Surround less damaging at higher temperatures than sulfur alone? If one keeps sulfur + Surround on their stone fruit from “set to harvest,” temperatures above 80F are very likely in that period.
I used Surround plus sulphur for about ten years, plus delayed dormant copper and oil. It is not a very good treatment, I had tons of rot. So I gave up on the organic approaches. My climate is very warm and humid so is particularly bad for rots; I believe the organic approach can work in cooler and/or drier areas.
