I don’t think “lead and arsenic is bad for your health” are controversial statements.
1 Like
If you are here to help people grow fruit without spray, then any useful info would be great. However if you make posts that I believe exaggerate the dangers of using or eating fruit that has been treated with pesticide I will respond with information that contradicts your opinions as a service to those of us in the humid region that often need some synthetic intervention to succeed. When I lived on the west coast I really didn’t understand how much different growing fruit would be in the east and when I finally tried to grow fruit here I was very annoyed by the false promises made by the Rodale Press and other bastions of the organic growing community about methods they espoused that always came up short.
Fine for vegetables, but peaches, plums, pears and apples- not so much.
The founder of this forum grows fruit without insecticide and only uses a synthetic fungicide to control brown rot as a last resort. His philosophy is opposed to poisons being used to produce food.
Mine is to use as little chemical intervention as possible to get a sound crop without a ridiculous amount of effort for a little fruit. I use a fraction of the pesticides to achieve those results than most who are paid to spray orchards in my region. .
4 Likes
Look I’m the no spray person in California for over 35 plus years, but I don’t grow enough to be 100% organic. I also buy non organic food, so of course there are spraying.
I think it’s all about location. I tend to grow things that are easier for me in California, why fight the natural environment.
Yes, I’m at the age that I don’t buy green bananas and I still don’t take a single thing in life despite eating non organic fruit/vegetables.
2 Likes
I hear what you’re saying, Alan, and you have much more experience than I do, but what I’ve seen in my part of New England leads me to think a little differently.
I’ve come across a number of evidently old and untended apple trees that bear significant crops of fruit. Not all of that fruit will be perfectly sound, to be sure, but I’ve checked the fruit from time to time, and my observation has been that a decent proportion is in decent shape and a decent proportion of the rest would be usable for juice, cider, etc. The most significant damage often appears to be from squirrels and birds. So my observations suggest that in this location, it’s quite possible to grow no-spray apples, though of course it may become more challenging if you’re growing more trees or for people with higher standards.
While I see fewer old pear trees around, my understanding is that pears are generally not any harder to grow than apples as far as pest and disease pressure go (barring fire blight), and in some respects easier.
Genuinely old peach trees are rarer still around here, but I do see peach trees that look like someone planted them in their yard and then largely forgot about them, and at least occasionally they appear to be bearing a decent crop of fruit. (Peaches are always dicey around here.) In fact, our neighbors had such a tree until a few years ago, and on the years when it didn’t get frosted out it would bear significant crops of fruit that the squirrels and birds (especially squirrels) would scatter all over the place. I know that they didn’t spray it because they didn’t take care of it at all.
So, if you’re not growing to sell, and you’re not too picky yourself, my local observations suggest that it’s possible to grow some of the common tree fruits without spraying - if you can find a way of dealing with the squirrels.
Personally, I grow mostly apples, and I’m much closer to putting serious effort into netting my trees than I am to spraying them. But this is merely a reflection on my personal situation.
4 Likes
There was never any intention to offend or to drown out the voice of the no spray camp.
If not spraying is how you prefer to live, go for it. But if you provide reasons to support that preference, and in a public forum, then it’s perfectly acceptable for us to debate those reasons, to challenge them, to see if they are actually reasonable.
We are letting you talk, including arguing for you position. But we’re also talking in response, including disagreeing with your argument. It’s not our fault if you find that disagreeable.
We aren’t attacking your values, we’re disagreeing with your reasoning. And we’re trying not to be rude about it.
And, I mean, I agree with most of the things you say, and I often find the arguments you make reasonable and knowledge rich. You’ve a wealth of information on rubus varieties that’s probably unparalleled on this site. So don’t take it too far when we disagree over an individual topic, eg spraying.
This, however, was rude. I wish you hadn’t said that.
5 Likes
Fair enough man. If you can get by with minimal or even no use of pesticides, more power to you. And if you’re doing that in part by preserving the genetic diversity of older varieties, that’s awesome.
But, in all fairness, your experience is in a while different world. You’re continental/maritime zone 5, I’m subtropical zone 8. My climate is more similar to Florida, Mexico, or even parts of Brazil than it is to yours. By USDA zones, I’m halfway between you and Cuba, and by Coppen climate zones, I’m closer to the Amazon than I am to you. And I suspect Alan is in a similar boat.
Pest and disease pressure here is insane. I can’t grow most of the things you grow even with the help of chemical sprays.
Now, I can get by, mostly by growing new or obscure stuff, like figs, blueberries, and blackberries specifically bred for the southeast, and things like pineapple guava and Asian persimmons, all with basically no chemical intervention whatsoever. So that’s what I grow. Do I wish I could grow traditional fruits? Heck yeah, but pretty much all of those were bred in places like Europe, which has the climate of the West coast, and the Northeast. There’s only been a hundred years or so of half-hearted breeding work in my climate, and that’s been done by starting with those poorly adapted cooler climate fruits. People have been breeding apples, pears, wine grapes, Mediterranean figs, and strawberries for thousands of years. I’d give a figurative arm and leg to have had even just half that much breeding work done on things like muscadine grapes, Chickasaw plums, black cherry, hardy opuntia, humidity resistant figs, cold hardy citrus and bananas and jelly palm, pawpaw, and ogeechee lime. With a few hundred years of breeding, those would make for incredible fruit. But instead, we’ve got fifty to a hundred years on a few of them, and zero on most. So, I just gotta work with what I’ve got.
4 Likes
I live about an hour east of @JinMA . It is not difficult to find apple trees grown with absolutely no spray and still producing decent crop.
There is an apple tree few hundred yards from my house. No spray, no thinning. The tree looks raggedy by late summer due to leaf diseases. It produces apples (yellow delicious?) every other year. The year it produces, the tree is loaded. The owner let us pick buckets of them. While a lot of them had bug damage, plenty more were clean apples.
Peaches are much more difficult. My friends and neighbors gave up and cut their trees down after borers, canker, leaf spots, etc. got to the trees and pests and brown rot got to the fruit.
A co-worker had a unknown peach tree that produced perfect fruit for 3 years without any spray. But she sold that house. At her new home, she bought a Contender last year. She just complained to me today that the Contender looks awful with leaf diseases. It has not produced a single fruit yet, it has already given her a headache. She won’t spray.
Can you grow peach trees in the east coast with no spray? To me, it depends on how you define edible peaches. If you don’t mind cutting off wormy parts or rotten part (brown rot) and eat around it, I guess the answer is yes.
My peach tree can produce 100-200 peaches. I want to give some to friends and neighbors. Can’t do that with wormy peaches. There was one year that every single peach on my tree got brown rot.
If you ask me if you produce clean/unblemished peaches with no spray, my answers are:
- yes, for the first few years. If you are lucky, it could be several more years until bugs and diseases find your trees.
- no, for long term (for unblemished peaches).
5 Likes
Im an hr and 1/2 or so north of you Id gues @mamuang. I have to say, my experience is almost the exact opposite vis a vis peaches and apples. Apples are endemic here, so on that level, they thrive sans spray. But barring an event like this years late frost that interrupts fruiting for a year or more, the apple crop can be almost 100% sub-edible. Perhaps its in part because they arent endemic here, and also that the interrupting events are far more frequent with peaches, but what I observe both here and at friends and neighbors’ houses is that when peaches bear, they bear well, and the fruit quality is often very high. Brown rot HAS ruined entire peach crops here, but that on a single tree, while quite nearby- maybe 60 ft., so well within range of spores, Ive had fruit minimally affected. Its obviously a factor of weather to a great extent, but even so, the tree Im thinking of sits to the south of the peach patch in question Prevailing summer wind here is from the south, so how to explain that? Brown rot is a problem no doubt, but for me its been something Ive been able to manage without spraying. Ive picked off infected fruit, which is invariably ripe or nearly so, and hucked them unceremoniously toward the woods. At times Ive wondered to what extent I am spreading the spores, but those concerns dont seem to have manifested substantially
Pest-wise, Id rate borers as significant, though my seedling trees seem to power through. I have curculios galore here, but they literally don’t bother my peaches at all. Ive talked to plenty of others in my area about their peaches. Of 10 or so fruit enthusiasts here with peach trees, none of them sprays to my knowledge. I think if you asked any of them about peaches they would describe them as boom and bust but otherwise very easy to grow. Most would also tell you they dont live long, though their demise is apt to be from overbearing and completely destroying the trunk and scaffolds. Youll know its a good peach year when you drive by someone’s house and all of the limbs are propped up higgledy piggledy with bits of lumber and branches. My oldest trees, fwiw, are about 15 years. One has a trunk about 6-7” in diameter, which is not common for grafted trees. It is actually an air layer of a seed peach grown out by an elderly neighbor ~30 or more years ago Id guess, based on its size at the time I layered it. I havent looked in several years to see if its still there.
2 Likes
Once rot shows up it’s never going away. You may get away for a while, but when rot and pc show up the show is over. It’s spray time forever.
I didn’t notice this other misleading post of lots of tiny peaches from some unknown source. Why do you post stuff like this and with those quotation marks around lucky suggesting it wasn’t lucky at all? This is not information because it can’t be validated in any way. Internet clutter destroys forums.
I can’t even tell when the photo was taken, but if it was this year those are early peaches and insect and fungus pressure has been exceptionally low this year- it was like Sonoma until a couple of weeks ago- I didn’t even need a shirt to protect myself from biting flies and that’s never happened in June. My “organic” gardening neighbor got a peach crop for the first time in several years, and that’s how it goes for him. On low pressure years he gets a crop- most years he stops by and I give him some of my surplus- I give away most of my peaches and horde my nectarines.
Also, if you live in suburbia surrounded by mowed lawns, pressure may be a lot less than if you border woods or meadows.
The sound advice to people that don’t want to spray is to plant a tree and see what happens - but promise nothing. Then that person can begin to decide how to manage an orchard on their particular site. No one can know what the pressure will be on any give site or what any individual considers worth doing to get what kind of fruit.
I grow all my own fruit and eat lots of it all year round with hundreds of pounds of frozen nectarines and blueberries in my freezer and apples in my fridge to carry me after harvest is done- none of my organic customers can say the same but they are happy with what they do get. Brown rot doesn’t always strike peaches and some varieties are more resistant to it than others. Generally the fuzzier the better and some years early peaches come in before brown rot begins to strike. Bit that’s just here.
3 Likes
Old strain yellow delicious and its seedlings often produce fruit without spray around here as well- as long as Marsonnina leaf blotch doesn’t show up. That’s a new game changer for the worse.
Nothing you wrote counters my experience. However, I’m not satisfied with occasional crops of fruit that stores poorly and has to be picked through and I’ve yet to find and untended peach tree in my region that I consider adequately productive of delicious fruit.
2-3 sprays are not that difficult and it’s not dangerous so I fail to understand the great value of trees with a little useful fruit some years and this forum is about helping people produce their own fruit, not how to forage fruit from neglected trees in ones neighborhood, even if that’s fun sometimes.
We’ve already discussed this in previous topics and your info was useful to me (your post this time was presented as if it’s the first time). I’ve since discovered several people that are happy with their unsprayed peach trees that exist on their property.
Everyone has their own standards, but I’m looking for a consistent source of fruit coming from the most bang for the buck of my labor. Those unsprayed peaches aren’t even worth the effort to harvest for me. A couple hours of effort and the right chemicals transforms the process.
I welcome a serious discussion about growing peaches in the northeast without spray but so far not a single member has contributed any commentary based on direct experience with their own trees for a period of years.
I am often trying to steer conversations here to the practically useful.
2 Likes
Here is a Hortscience article on resistance to Bacterial Leaf Spot in NC and SC. 156 peaches, 40 nectarines and other prunus species were evaluated in 1984. Basically California breeding is not concerned with that disease in their dry climate so most don’t do will in humid climates.
It’s endemic though, no? Is it really “showing up” or is it there all of the time anyway? Botrytis is another one that can be very destructive (of various crops) and theres clearly inoculum present at a background rate waiting for conditions to be right.
Here are some more “lucky” eastern US peach growers… They grow fruits and vegetables and sell at their farmstand, farmer’s markets, etc. They’ve recently talked a lot about being “USDA Certified Organic”. Yet in most all their posts it’s “we don’t spray anything ever”. Which I’d personally refer to as “no spray” as opposed to “organic”.
Their post from yesterday has a closer shot of their peaches:
Come by our farm stand today from 3:30-6:30 for some fresh organic tomatoes 
and peaches 
Remember, if it’s not certified, it’s most likely not actually organic!
Today, we have peaches, cherry tomatoes, slicer tomatoes, striped tomatoes, green tomatoes, and paste tomatoes.
2 Likes
Thats what you see here with the piedmont ridgelines having been preferred for frost protection. . Growers obviously observed that these spots were least affected by frost. This must have been deemed pretty valuable, because every other thing about these sites is inferior. Soil depth is minimal, as is access to groundwater.
The thing is (and Im not trying to counter anyone or advocate for or against spraying, mind you) where I live, you could spray peaches all you want and still youd only get a crop maybe every 3 years. Barring blossoms and fruit, BR inoculum is limited to twigs and cankers. The first are easily dealt with, and the second come about during advanced stages, no? So no spray peaches are a reasonable gamble here, and one that many make.
If, as @scottfsmith says, a single spring application of fungicide takes care of most BR pressure, Id gladly pursue that. I dont have the time or proclivity for the kind of intensive management some are describing though, nor does it seems warranted based on my experience and observation here in this locale.
2 Likes
Not a single spray, I put it in every Surround tank. So 4-5 sprays.
For you in Vermont one spray could do it. I can believe people grow no spray peaches there, there is much less time for the rot to build up. Also dry places out west can do pretty well. Maybe there are other places as well based on something unique about the climate etc.
4 Likes
In this particular forum there is not much room for any other possibilities than what the particular person has encountered. I think i have told you and said that i am here to learn… i think there was a topic “arguing to learn”. Which makes these threads almost like an episode of Perry Mason where we tend to offer evidence of this vs evidence of that. I am bad about that and I own it.
If you are a member of Hobby Fruit Growers on any given day… someone will post a picture of a ‘spray’ and there will be many dozens of folks against it… This morning there was a product that drenches the soil and kills everything. The poster had no idea and likely didnt read the directions at all…
Folks knee jerk reaction is to post a selfie with a poison and say when do i spray this and how often… zero of their own homework… zero search function usage… just plain and simple ‘give me the cliffnotes’ The ‘experts’ will tell them without scrutiny how harmful it can be… one fellow this morning posted the instructions that clearly state not for residential usage.
So again…my theory is that to get the right answer you have to post the wrong answer. Folks cannot help themselves to correct others… especially intelligent folks. This forum is full of intelligent people its obvious.
There are many many many folks on FB, youtube and blogs and other freedom of speech platforums that are happy to say that they dont spray. I have never seen anyone blatently come out and try to prove them wrong… but i dont read every comment…so perhaps there are. From what i see folks are happy and proud that folks are trying to grow things chemical free.
Its not only sprays… there are some folks that free range chickens and folks that compost…theres folks that do no-till…theres folks that are into pollinators there are also folks into birds and insects. All are part of a ‘holistic orchard’ or ‘permaculture lifetstyle’ or ‘organic’ or whatever term fits how you want to live your life.
There are folks that obsess on posting selfies of perfect fruits… they will have brix meters, they will have their fruit on a scale, they will have pictures of the bags on the fruits, some are very proud of their sprays and will tell u even though you dont ask what to spray and when.
Thats society… we are many cultures all living in the same place.
Since you are like me and also read FB posts and groups… have you found a group that is solely dedicated to spraying food and fruits? Like a special place for chemical advocates? How about a pest free group? Like how to remove everything in nature that is attracted to the things you grow because that is their instinct and reason for life on Earth?
I have not seen such groups… i see the opposite. Groups of people that are more peaceful… sharing.
Why does not spraying, not using herbicides, pesticides and things harmful to animals, insects and the environment evoke such negativity in the advocates of those things? Its like the antithesis of growing your own fruit.
I would challenge anyone that is an advocate and that goes out of their way to disprove that folks can and do grow things without spraying or using harmful substances to go to an open forum and post their selfies of all their chemicals laid out on a table and ask the question “how do i spray all of these and when” Just as every other member does.
There is no way in modern times that they could defend themselves on an open forum as they do so brazenly on this group. I have seen it too often… any member that is an avid reader like me has seen the comments. I bet you would turn off the comments within a day.
Pro tip- you can do this post ‘anonymously’ if u like…there is a toggle for that now.
Also if you like you can post a basket of peaches from a farmers market if you like and say "i grew these on the East Coast with No Spray’ I bet that nobody will call you a liar… nor tell you what to spray or when. I honestly bet folks would be happy for you.
This would be more interesting than any TikTok challenge.
1 Like
I am spraying mine tonight for Japanese Beetles and Stinkbugs with Carbaryl. If not, no tree ripe peaches 4 sale for the weekend.