Remove plums to preserve apples?

General Fruit Growing
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I live on an old homestead with lots of large standard apple trees. Maybe due to type, size, etc pest pressure has never been much of an issue and most years we get good crops with no spraying.

I added a couple of plums 2-3 years ago and with this being the first year of them setting fruit i’ve observed the presence and impact of the curculio.

I figure that if I do nothing not only will i have no plum fruits but the local curculio population will increase exponentially each year and negatively affect the apples. I also reckon that if I spray the plums I’ll have to also spray the apples which i don’t want to do nor is it practical due to size. There must be something with the presence of plum trees, maybe smell of their pollen?, that draws the menace in from the underworld and if plums are ‘surrounded’ they’ll focus on the apples, no?

So I view the plums as a reservoir and am thinking I will remove them entirely to hopefully limit the future presence of the beast. Are there any other options I might be missing?

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FWIW I have no fruiting plum trees now or in the past… My apple and peach trees still get hammered by “plum” curculio though. A physical barrier (bagging) or an insecticide is the only way I’d get clean fruit from either.

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My apples get hammered by plum curculio each year but I think that the wild vegetation near to them has much more to do with it than my one plum tree. What I don’t know is if the insects pressure would much less if I was in a more urban setting. I do spray and my plums were clean this year but my apples surely will not be. Some years the freeze gets my plums but I still have the insect damage to the apples.

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I’ve never dealt with PC. But my understanding is that the PC larva get crushed by apple and pear fruit and thus they are not affected. Further if PC were going to attack your apples, they’d have done it long ago. They don’t need an invitation to multiply on anything they can.

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