Due to constant rain, I have had to keep spraying my peach trees. I have seen one side of one of three trees has maybe a dozen oozing peaches. They are 1.25 inch in diameter. I have seen no flagging at all
I assume the oozers are in a hopeless state due to age/size. Last year I didn’t notice any OFM until I found a few at harvest. I’d slice one open and find a worm at the pit, but 95% of the peach was fine to process.
So the question is, OFM worms before pit hardening equals death of the peach. After, just a worm in there? So remove all oozers at this 1.25 inch size?
OFM don’t usually eat the pit, that is what the curculio does. But since you are in 5b I would guess you have curculio not OFM now - OFM is mainly in the shoot tips earlier in the season. Curculio don’t ooze a lot but in the rain they can.
Note that a few peach varieties will ooze a lot in the rain along the crack, no insect damage needed. I pulled off a couple oozing Fosters yesterday I thought had bugs in them, but there were no bug tracks.
I can’t say I really have seen much damage inside deep, just near the surface. When a pulled a few off, some had nothing visible. So I leave the peaches on for now. This years set is a lot lighter so I have to work with what I got.
Last year I harvested approx 500 pc from each of our 3 Red Havens! That was after exhaustive thinning. This year I likely have 250 green peaches per tree average. But between the many bird pecks and oozing, hard to say what it will be at the end.
The last bit that is always frustrating, is the uneven placement of fruit. One tree has very few on one side. The other side I can find fruit wood with 6 fruits at 2 inches a part. I thinned those but it was painful