This year has been a challenging season to my conceit of very limited fungicide to achieve good stone fruit harvests in the humid northeast. I’ve lost half the fruit on my largest TangO’s peach and my Eastern Glow nects have been a mess that has caused me to harvest earlier than I’d like.
Part of the problem is probably the most vigorous growth I’ve ever seen on my trees in general. On the TangO’s the tree got away from me even though I pruned it a month before fruit began to ripen- 3 weeks later and there was excessive shade on fruit- plus nearby nursery peach trees blocked light and air as well, having similar crazy growth. Also factors increasing growth of trees also increased the wateriness of fruit.
The nectarines got burned by a late hard frost that didn’t affect peaches too much. These events cause a certain amount of living abortions, so to speak. These are fruit that stop growing once achieving smaller than golf ball size and stay on the tree. They rot and spread it if you don’t remove them, which is quite time consuming and I’m always hoping till the last minute that they will be sound fruit. The freeze also caused minor dimple injuries that lead to early brown rot even as it otherwise grows normally. The partial abortions are getting and spreading a disgusting black rot I don’t remember seeing before. Eventually it leads to a blue mold. Add all the bird pecks to the mix, and you got problems.
The future looks better because E Glow seems to have suffered from the frost more than other of my nects (for the second time). Summer Beaut is almost ready to pick and I’ve got most of the golf balls off. The growing fruit doesn’t have as many dimples either and there’s a lot more fruit on the tree to begin with.
But there are easier things to grow than nectarines and the TangO’s peach.
More from the northeast. Last year my Delight and Sprite plume x cherry plum cross had no fungus so I didn’t spray this year. A big mistake. They are all getting Brown rot as they are getting closer to ripening. I’ll try one more year before they get removed. Dapple Dandy and Flavor Supreme are ten feet away with no sign of fungus.
Its about the worst year ever here for rot. For my location its been caused by very high rain/cloudiness along with perfect temperature/humidity for rot. The growth is also high and the extra shading sure isn’t helping.
One positive aspect though is it makes clear which varieties are really bad for rot and I feel less bad about removing them. There are so many good varieties that I don’t cry too much when I get rid of a rotter.
It is the worst year here in memory as well, but so far it hasn’t eliminated the bulk of any of my harvest although I leave fruit without active fungicide for a pretty long stretch. I think it is more than rain, because we’ve had more consistently wet seasons without this level of infection but I think nights have hit the sweet spot for rot in terms of dew and higher temps. Who knows?
Probably lost about 40% of the fruit so far from my largest of two TangO’s. The smaller one that didn’t get away from me is much better. I’ve been harvesting ripe fruit from them for a few days, but the bulk is still on the trees.
Hello, rot not to much of a problem here, Sour Cherrys in the lower meadow got slammed because I was watching the ones in the upper meadow for my spray schedule (upper meadow did fine). Worst problems this year was the record rainfall in June, drowned off the weaker cancor infected trees (we are in clay) so I have a lot of spaces to fill next year, need to make the ditches deeper. Rain occurred well before ripening so it did not cause much rot. Thunder storm Tues blew a lot of fruit off the trees, and messed up my netting, but I am really impressed with the ability of the bug netting to keep the Japenese beetles, Bees and Wasps (as well as the birds) off the fruit, Best harvest ever for the Purple hearts, will have to use sellable fruit to make jam this year (vs throwing away bug eaten fruit because we had more than we needed for jam).
Here the weather was super nice. Not really bad at all. Some days the humidity was only 30%. Very rare. I have not seen any rot. I have not seen any fungus except septoria spot on tomatoes.
Rain has been rare for a month. All the lawns are brown.
Alan I have just started spraying MFF. I should really hold my tongue on rot. Egad, my peaches get one bird peck and they are half brown and moldy the next day. Ugly too. I have lost 50% of my Shui Mi Tao peaches to brown rot this summer. Not happy about it.
Yeah, birds are fierce here this year and contributing to rot. At some sites the problem is lack of thinning. At one site I left unpopular plums unthinned because the fruit goes to waste anyway, at others I’m not responsible for thinning and it’s supposed to be done by others. In the future I will simply keep thinning until there is virtually no touching fruit because these compressed clusters are impossible to get spray between fruit and rot starts there and can’t be stopped. The trees end up with physical damage when the rot passes into small wood and girdles it.
This year I mostly stopped thinning when I thought it too late to improve fruit and it was the wrong decision.
You are right and amusing on that score. I’ve never had blue jays attack my fruit before. The worst offenders are these ugly yellow brown birds that come in small flocks and settle on a tree until everything ripe is pecked. Those I’d be willing to take out with a shotgun but they are extremely cautious and evasive. In the past, it was small woodpeckers that created the most damage, and they are in the mix as well. I couldn’t shoot these no matter how much fruit they damaged, and not because it’s probably illegal. Their numbers are small and they are so beautiful.
I have so many plum trees to distract them that my peaches and nectarines aren’t badly affected but lets see what happens when I’m done netting my plums and pluot.