You don’t but you don’t need to coat them either. Also a hand pump, at least mine it’s not a huge spray, fairly easy to direct. It’s not that I don’t want to spray them, it won’t hurt may even help. Fruit is spaced so I spray around each fruit. Also lot’s of areas with no fruit that do not need to be sprayed like the newly grown tips of branches, near the trunk on peaches etc. My trees are kept small. I can reach every fruit just by reaching for it.
I guess its our geographic location difference, but I absolutely have to spray the exact areas you say you don’t- ie the tips and new growth. If I don’t, none of my immature stone fruit trees would ever get any bigger. OFM pressure here is so high that If I go more than 10-14 days without spraying the tips, they will bore into them and the top 4 inches or so will die, and it will be a month or so before those dead tips are replaced with new growth. This is especially frustrating for me because even in years when I have no peaches at all on my trees, I still have to spray them if I want them to put on new growth. And we aren’t just talking about a few flagging tips. In my orchard, if I don’t spray for 2 weeks, each and every single tip on every single peach tree and most plum and pluot trees will be killed. You can always pull them apart and find the little OFM larvae inside too.
I also have peach leaf curl on many of my stone fruits, fire blight and CAR on apples and pears, black spot on grapes, persimmon psylla and scale, and other fungi and diseases of the leaves. If I didn’t spray leaves I would be in big trouble. But I will concede that I may be too heavy handed, which is why I’m curious about how much liquid others spray.
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Man that Murphy guy must have lived near you when he came up with his theorem. “If it can go wrong it will.” You have a whole ecosystem going there. Well good job even getting a harvest! I panic when I have deer pressure! Which I’m sure you face too. And those herbicide wielding neighbors of yours. You could probably work for a university you have learned so much! Show them a thing or two! 
I have not seen OFM yet. No deer can get in my yard. PC pressure is low. Brown rot too.
I have seen black knot once and promptly removed it. That was 3 years ago. I do have a shorter season, but rarely do we have late freezes. We had one 2 days ago and maybe another Monday night. Rare, and I don’t know if I had any damage? In a few weeks I will.
At my cottage I have deer pressure but again it’s low. None there this last winter.
I’m going to stop bitching about my short season after hearing what you face! Maybe one day we can push them out of existence. .
@thecityman,
You have my sympathy. In my area, I have seen flagging shots into late Sept and sometimes, early Oct. And OFM is just one of many pests we are facing.
I can’t wait to try your Dragon Tears this year.
I meant to take a photo today to show…but I’ve already been hit this year with the OFM flagging shoots. Actually, it was a case study in the effectiveness of imidan! I say that because I sprayed all my trees except one about a week ago. I ran out of spray and it was getting dark so I planned to spray it the next day but got busy and forgot about it. Anyway, just this afternoon I was walking through my orchard and I noticed one single tree had every single limb tip on it wilted over. Then I remembered…it was that one tree I never did spray last week. So if anyone ever wonders about the miracle of Imidan, that tree is the perfect lesson!!! Not a single other tip on any other tree in my orchard was flagging/wilted, but the tree I didn’t spray had every single tip wilted over. I slit open the shoot just below the wilt and in every case, there is the little larvae!!! So yea, here OFM hits hard and hits early. Those bore holes were probably done a couple days ago. Apparently even cold weather doesn’t deter them! GRRRR
BTW…for all the excitement and love I have for Dragon Tears, here where I live it just isn’t worth growing and that is so hard for me to say. In the last 7 years I have got fruit on it only 2 times, and in one of those years I only got 3 fruit. SO really only one year was it loaded. The problem is simple…its cold hours are just insanely short…that tree honestly has bloomed in January some years and ALWAYS blooms in February. Now that is just crazy!!! But its usually when we get a few warm days here, which you probably don’t get in February so hopefully its working out for you. Do you remember when it bloomed for you this year? Was it somewhat in line with your other plums/pluots? At my place it blooms a full month or more before all my other stone fruit. I sure don’t want to discourage you after years of talking about it- because when it does fruit it is just out of this world. But one good year in 7 is just crazy. That being said, its so good when it does fruit that Im certainly going to keep it!
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It is not the first plum or pluot that blooms in my yard. It blooms with Shiro and the majority. It is not an early bloomer here. Thanks goodness. Hopefully it sets some fruit.
haha. WEll, you know what they say, grass is always greener on the other side. Your lack of some enemies I fight sounds good, but of course I also have advantages I’m sure you would envy. My favorite fruit of all is my Saijo Asian Persimmon and I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t even survive your climate. I do have the temperature that enables me to grow a wider variety of fruit than most people. So we all have good and bad things.
Back to the discussion of how much Spray all of us use per tree when we do spray, those of you who reported using less per tree may well just have smaller trees. Its very hard to show the real size of my trees, but I wanted to try. Here are some of my mature peach trees that I said I use about 1.5 to 1.75 gallons of spray on per tree. I suspect these may be bigger than some of your peach trees???
The photo makes it look like these aren’t open center but they are. However, I do admit that I’ve let them get taller than I should have. But my electric sprayer can reach the tops and I don’t mind using a ladder once a year to pick the higher up fruit. But I’m guessing these are bigger than most of yours so that may explain my higher spray volume???
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My currants came in today! It looks like they woke up in transit, and the leaves are a little pallid. There’s still a lot of buds yet to open, so I’m going with it will be less stressful for me to plant them immediately even if some leaves get fried in the sun, than for me to nurse then along until the leaves darken up. Anyone think differently? There’s a break in the rain in about an hour, so I’ll probably try then. I can probably also mitigate the sun exposure with some Agribon.
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I received a couple of cherries in full flower and i tried to baby one and planted the other out. The babied one died horribly.
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I would plant it right away and then if i could i would use some stakes or a tomato cage and some fabric or something to block the sun for a few days if i could. I have also used saw horses and a board for plants like that.
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I like the saw horses idea! That will make it easier to hang Agribon or something over them.
@lordkiwi, that’s what I’m afraid of. Thanks for the confirmation!
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I’ve had bad luck with West Coast shipments this year. They seem to get delayed and hang out over the weekend. Fortunately, everything’s pulled through just fine. Hopefully these will, too.
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And, planted. Only two of them were really far along on closer inspection, so I only covered those two.
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All my stone fruit trees start waking up from the branches at the bottom first.The local Santa Rosa I bought recently had the same pattern. We actually bought the tree because there was a single upright branch that had no leaves or flowers that open yet. It helped pollinating the very late blooming Elephant Heart.
I read somewhere that it is because of the inadequate chilling hours in our area. I am not sure that is the only reason. The Fortune plum that blooms way earlier than other trees every year requires 500 hrs, while the lowest requirement is 200 hrs. It is not self fruitful. Luckily, its blooming season is very long, and it ends up with fruits from top to bottom.
Most of the time the amount of fruits on each tree changes each year. I give up on guessing and just get two of any trees we really like.
Thank you! The top part of the tree has slowly started to leaf out and bloom. I guess the upside will be a longer period of fruit from the tree.
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That is true. The weather is so weird this season I see a lot of trees blooming the second time now. The Santa Rosa I have in ground for more than ten years doesn’t set much fruits, and blooming time is very unpredictable. Burgundy plum is loaded every year no matter when it blooms, but I don’t think it is a good pollenizer. You may like the pluots. They somehow pollinate everything including plums that are blooming at the same time, and the skin of the fruit is not sour like plums. Please look at the local nursery and observe maybe a year before you invest in something new. The microclimate is very important in getting fruits.
I have to hand pollinate the plum tree to get any fruit. The bees do not seem to be very attracted to its flowers, particularly in the corner that I have it planted. I’ll have to look at the pluots. I do have a Snow Queen nectarine that is doing pretty well and I’m looking forward to trying the fruit this year.
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Your hands are much more skillful than mine. No matter what I used, the flowers fell off when I touched so I leave them alone now. Don’t plant them near citrus trees, when they are in bloom the bees ignore everything else. Please let me know how the Snow Queen tastes at your place later. For me Arctic Queen is the best. BTW, the Honeycrisp apple starts blooming now. I know you said not to get it, but it was on sale locally and I couldn’t resist. We will see if it set any fruits.
Finaly a post I can hijack to talk about my pulots.
Left is my peach tree with 10 sets after loosing most frost or something.
center left splash, emerald drop, flavor grenade and geo pride
Fruit set on all 4 grafts even two that where heavly damaged by deer rubbing.
center right flavor king, flavor queen, flavor supreme, and dapple dandy
Granted most of this tree is flavor queen now and it is a shy setter hardly any of the other grafts set either. All 12 of my plums and pulots flowered this year
The plums did lag behind with barely any setting on Santa Rosa and Satsuma and good set on the shiro and ok set on the Burbank
Santa Rosa and Shiro bloomed way to late to be called prime pollinator partners.
The Pulots are both on the same rootstock and where bought the same year from Raintree.
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Glad your HC is doing well! Mine has started to leaf out, which is the earliest it has ever done so, sometimes taking into June before bud break.
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