I haven’t had worms in peaches for years although I don’t generally apply insecticide to fruit more than a few days into June. I’ve had a lot more OFM around in the past than this year -partially because I spray the tips of my nursery trees these days when I see much flagging going on.
I’m testing some later peaches because I’ve enjoyed my first crops of White Heath the last couple years. Indian Free, Laurol and Victoria have some ripening fruit now but all the softening fruit has worms in it. Not very appetizing.
Maybe growing peaches this late allows me to have OFM as a new fruit pest here. In the past it only affected growing shoots. Now I may have to figure out a new low spray program for late peaches.
OFM can be white or reddish, depending on what they are eating I think. Put it on your hand and if it “walks” and doesn’t just roll it is OFM. Curcs have no legs.
Alan, I have major problems with late OFM. I’m not spraying any bug killers so I probably have more OFM than you do across the board, but the late ones are particularly prone. This year most of my Heath were infested. I also had problems with that peach dropping early, and I am now leaning to it being due to the high rate of OFM. It seems particularly prone, my next latest is Indian Free and while its pretty bad its not as bad as Heath. This year was worse than usual for OFM for me, I think we had more nice OFM weather than usual. I also got more CM than usual, I had hardly any the last couple of years but had a good % infested this year.
Yep, no legs rolled of my hand, it was a curc. OFM was a problem here as well. But I’ve pruned it off, sprayed the ground and raked up the leaves and twigs. Really cleaning up well this year.
To piggy back on this discussion, I had a few problems with SWD in peaches for the first time this year. I quit spraying about the last month of the season and SWD really exploded. Didn’t loose a whole lot of peaches but I had to watch closely to see if there were any spots which penetrated the skin.
They would tend to attack the near the stem and penetrate there mostly. Firmer fruit was obviously less susc. to damage. This is a bad bug here.
They are swarming my ripe fruit for the first time also, but I haven’t found any larva in the fruit, not even the blackberries. I’m having problems because for the first time the deer are not eating my drops and my orchard floor is littered with ripe to rotten fruit.
Picking up falling, over-ripe or rotten half eaten fruit is not fun. What about a ‘fallen’ apple harvester? The small type that you push like a lawn mower?
Orchard sanitation is always recommended by unv. ext. We spent at least a couple man hours per day picking up fruit early this season when I let a lot of the fruit drop because of very poor quality due to the extreme rain. (The paper claimed the KC International airport reported 4 days it did not rain in May.)
As the season wore on things dried out and we sold a lot more fruit, but it got so busy we couldn’t keep up with picking up drops.
In the end I have to admit there was a “fog” of fruit flies (probably a large part SWD) under the trees. In addition, there were so many yellow jackets and paper wasps I was almost afraid of picking. They were everywhere on the ground, feeding on drops. I got stung this summer from picking peaches where I didn’t see the yellow jackets had tunneled into the fruit on the opposite side. First time I’ve seen yellow jackets so bad. Literally thousands of them.
I have really appreciated my later apples this year, because they look like perfection compared to what I was dealing with on peaches and plums. Even the hornets have slowed down. I got very lucky not getting bitten this year, I grabbed many a fruit and found my finger sinking into a filled hornet-hole I did not see. I dropped a lot of fruit running for my life from hornets this year!
I raked half as many plum prunes as I picked and turned into jam. My loss this year was overwhelming. But the clean-up was important. I would hate for my neighbors to complain about ‘rats’. We have mice and voles, but not rats as of yet.
ouch!