Yes,they need to be cinched fairly tight.
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Iām sorry Dennis, can you explain your schedule a bit moreā¦not sure what you mean by 3 and 1 week preharvest? Iām sure Iāll feel dumb when you explain but its not clicking in my brain right now what you are saying with that?
Have you had any experience with Inspire Super? Iāve heard good things about using it for brown rot and may give it a go. While it is apparently more expensive per application, the initial investment is about 1/2 that of indar which sounds good to me.
@mamuang yes, 27 peach trees is a huge, huge chore to thin. HOWEVER, about half of them are quite small and about 8 are just 3rd year, trees. Iāve let about 6 of my older peach trees get way, way too big. It takes me about 3 hours PER TREE to thin some of those (using ladder, etc) I start thinning almost as soon as very small fruitlets appear, and I thin daily until the last ones are 3/4ths golf-ball sizes, which from what I read is probably too late to do a lot of good at making remaining peaches larger, but its still helpful to keep limbs from breaking. But trust me, I feel your pain and hate thinning- though not as much as I hate spraying! ha
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Iām guessing that means a spray 3 weeks before he expects to pick the fruit and another spray 1 week before the expected picking time. The obvious question which sprung to my mind is what he does if he has 10-20 varieties with different dates. Does he try to group them? Seems like you might need a spreadsheet to keep track of what gets sprayed when. For instance:
Variety- date
A - pick on 7/15
B- pick on 8/1
C & D- pick on 8/7
You might spray:
A: 6/24 & 7/8
B: 7/9 & 7/23
C & D- 7/16 & 7/30
Once you calculate the above, I image you would merge the 7/8 and 7/9 sprays, but that would still leave you with 5 sprays for just 4 varieties. And I have peach/nec from early July through the end of September.
Honestly, I donāt know if I could even definitively ID each of the grafts. I think I can get most of them, and I do tend to look things up when they start to look close to ripe 
I just spray fungicides on everything 2-3 times during the summer. Which works a lot better than before I started spraying, but I still sometimes see issues, especially on damaged fruit.
Edit: I took my best guess at what is still alive (Iāve had a surprising number of peaches die in recent years. Almost like apricots, except the peaches get a bit older), 18 trees, with 21 varieties (8 nec, the rest peach). Though that is treating several seedlings like a single variety (as they have behaved so far).
As long as I do two summer fungicide sprays during summer- one for early ripening ones around July 7th and one for late ripening ones about a month later, it seems to work for me in NY and CT.
The trees need to have good light though and some sites have poor air drainage and suffer more on wet years like last one. Too often my customers canāt be bothered to remove rotting fruit. That is as important as spray protocol.
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My cots are trained against the white south wall of my house and were almost blooming when we got 19F. I have no idea how much heat from the walls got to the buds but I have crop on the lower sides of branches, except only a few on sugar pearls, but itās a bit more exposed than the other 3 varieties. I have an Orange-Red growing in the open that has maybe 3 fruit on it. The closer buds are too the wall the earlier they bloom, some of those were open when the freeze occurred.
My site is just a touch too cold for cots to bear consistently out in the open, nearby customers in more favored spots do much better.
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Any pointers on where to purchase some of these highly acclaimed nectarines like the āHoneyā series and get it shipped outside California.
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Spray at full bloom. With peach trees ripening from early to late I would spray 1 week before the early harvest then 2 to 3 weeks later spray again. If brown rot is a problem on late peaches spray again in 3 weeks.
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Itās a combination of Difenoconazole and Cyprodinil. I donāt know how effective they are. Unfortunately most of these products donāt come in small amounts and are expensive to try.
I donāt know what the half life is for Inspire Super. Indar may be effective because of itās long half life. I donāt know what it is on foliage but in the soil Indar half life is shown to be 87 days so it may also be very long on foliage.
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Thanks. After doing some research it really seems to have a great reputation for brown rot and lots of university sites are mentioning it now, so I think Iāll give it a try. Its about $250 per bottle. I get that the per application price is higher than Indar, but a $450 investment is a lot for me! ($250 isnāt nothing!).
I know one thing, Iāve applied Captan and Myclo 3 times since my trees broke dormancy and I soaked my trees and fruit hardā¦and Iām not sure I have any less brown rot than I would have if I had sprayed NOTHING. Iām done with those for brown rot. I do 100% agree with @scottfsmith that myclo is amazing for black spot of grapes- just amazing (thanks for teaching me that a few years ago Scott) but for brown rot its useless IMHO.
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Thanks Bob. You have a great point about the different varieties with different ripening dates that may need to be tracked. I just spray all my trees when I spray the first 3 times, then I stop on the ones with earlier ripening times when I do my 4th and 5th sprays. That being said, and I know people here are going to attack me for saying this, but because I donāt track all 27 of my varieties closely, I will admit that I probably violate the PHI on some once in a while. Not by much- just a few days at worst, but it probably happens. When everyone writes to tell me how awful that is, please remember, I donāt sell fruit and consume probably 85% myself. I donāt spray anything within 2-3 weeks of harvest but I know some sprays and some fruits have longer PHI. But spraying all my trees separately and tracking each tree separately to be 100% sure that I donāt break the PHI by a few days once in a while would be almost impossible. I have around 150 trees and about 30 types of fruit now. OK, I know I just upset some people. Sorry Your example of breaking things into groups and spraying accordingly is an idea I may well implement, so thanks.
If youāve said what you use for Brown Rot Iāve missed it or forgotten, can you tell me again, please? Thanks Bob.
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That shouldnāt be an issue for fungicides. Many of them are 0-1 day PHI. I looked at the ones Iāve used in recent years and the only one which wasnāt 0-1 days was Daconil, which says to not spray once fruit has formed (basically for dormant and during bloom).
I think insecticides may have longer PHI, which would make sense as we are biologically closer to insects than to fungus.
Again- this is what I found by a quick look, please donāt take it as gospel and do your own checks for anything you are using.
Indar: āUp to day of harvestā
Luna Sensation: āDo not apply LUNA SENSATION within 1 day of harvest.ā
Infuse/MFF (Propiconazole): Couldnāt find it on label, but I think if it isnāt mentioned, it is assumed to be 0.
Elevate (got last year, but havenāt used yet): āPHI = 0 dayā
Daconil: āDo not apply between fruit formation and harvestā
Merivon (this is the first year): 0 day PHI
Myclobutanil/Rally: āApplications may be made up
to the day of harvest.ā
Iām still a work in progress. I generally spray 2-3 times during the summer, each time with 1-2 different fungicides. I sprayed 1-2 times during the dormant season this year because Iām trying to wipe out blossom blight, especially on sour cherries. I think it worked better than in the past, but I need at least another spray. Maybe during flowering. Also, I think I used Daconil (because it canāt be used later) and one other (maybe Luna Sensation). Maybe I should try Indar next year during the early season, rather than saving it for summer.
Yes, insecticide is the one that has PHI much longer than fungicide.
What weird is that the same insecticide has different PHI on different fruit.
I mixed Luna and Indar for pre bloom spray to prevent brown rot blossom blight which seemed to work.
Same thing for the fungicides. One of them had a PHI of 28 for Soybeans and 0 for peaches.
Did you spray before bloom or during?
I sprayed at pink once. I just follow Scottās advice. Mix them at their regular strength. Then, the next spray is at petal fall.
I try to avoid spraying during bloom. I donāt know what a long term effect it will have on bees if I spray at bloom.
Iām sorryā¦ I wasnāt clear. I knew there wasnāt much of a PHI for fungicides, but I spray for insects and fungicides at the same time. ANd I know some insecticides do have a quite long PHI on some fruits (shorter on others, strangely) so thatās what I meant about I spray everything at once and therefore probably commit some phi violations at times- though not much. Still, I know that isnāt good or safe.
Still, your information was extremely helpful. Iāve about to decided to try inspire super fpr brown rot, and spent today calling my local farm stores - some of which surprisingly had it on the shelf. Iām just so disgusted by brown rot this year and thatās why I asked about your use. Thanks for info.
I do both together as well, but only in the spring. Once summer comes around, I switch to fungicide only. I think Alan published a spray guide which talks about this approach. Actually, I think I first read about it in one of his old Gardenweb posts close to 15 years ago. So my last insecticide spray of 2024 is around now. That leaves plenty of time to hit the PHI, with the earliest fruit a few apricots in late June and most stuff much later.
Iāve got several sprayers, as I donāt want to have accidental crossover between:
Insecticide + fungicde
fungicide only
herbicide
I donāt think there is any issue with fungicides and bees, But I do make sure to use the āfungicide onlyā tank for the dormant/pre-bloom spray to ensure that insecticide residue isnāt sprayed on the soon to open flowers.
Though Iām sure I damage some bees. I have a lot of stuff close together, so it is hard to not spray when there are some flowers around. Just the other day I was looking at a ready to be sprayed peach with a large branch hanging over a blackberry in full bloomā¦
THank you bob. And thanks also for addressing the bee/fungicide thing because I had wondered about that as well. I certainly knew not to spray insecticide during bloom because of bees, but I really wondered if fungicides hurt them. This year, Iāve thought about that sooo much because I refused to spray fungicide during bloom even though Iād read it might really help with blossom (brown) rot. Since Iām having such a horrific brown rot year, Iāve been wondering every day if its because I didnāt spray DURRING bloom (I did b4 and after). Next year, Iām going to hit my blooms with fungicides.
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I remember reading a bunch of the fungicides are harmful to pollinators. I donāt remember which off the top of my head. Iāll see if I can find the paper or somebody else might know. Hereās something on it: Considerations for disease management - Pollinators & Pollination
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