Spray schedule for a mixed backyard orchard

Hi Ana-

I also live in Central Illinois and I have apples and cherries (both sweet and tart).

I am not familiar with either of the chemicals that you have listed. I don’t think they are commonly used by backyard growers in my experience. For fungicides generally backyard growers use Captan, Immunox or Indar. For an insecticide currently the new Sevin formulation is favored. Perhaps either @alan or @Olpea could comment since they both have a fair amount of experience with chemicals used commercially.

Spraying a combination of insecticide and fungicide at petal fall and 10 days later is a reasonable place to start but you may need more sprays. I would advise you to add a third spray of fungicide only in the Spring before bloom. Take a look at Alan’s synthetic spray for a starting point.

I would think you have a reasonable chance of making the three sprays work well for the apples and pears in central Illinois if you’re not concerned with the sooty botch and fly speck which is the black sooty residue that washes off and is really only a cosmetic problem.

Peaches I expect will need more sprays in addition to the three mentioned above during the time the peaches are close to ripening. The extra sprays will be needed to control brown rot on the peaches.

Picking up dropped apples will help reduce the population moths to some degree and it is commonly recommended. It may not be practical if the size of the orchard is large or the percentage of apples dropped is large. If you get good control of the coddling moths with the insecticide the number of drops should be reduced significantly and it will make it more practical to pick up the smaller numbers of apples on the ground.

How large are the trees you have and how many trees do you have?