Can you buy this from Big Box Stores or only from online?
Hi Tom! I use copper with a sticker or hort. oil. I use hort oil in the spring by itself.
MrsG,
You meant mixing copper with hort. oil? At what ratio? I looked up Home Depot website but they don’t seem to carry it. So it must be bought online then?
I started fruit trees for 5 years and have never spray anything except Sevin on the J. beetles last year. This year, my pluots first time fruiting but were totaled with PC so I guess I’ll have to start somewhere to keep the “fruits of my labor”!
Tom
Tom,
Oil, Copper,Lime Sulfur or anything else, the label will tell you how many TBS. or OZ per gallon of water.
Just add the right amount to the amount of spray you are making.
Mike
Tom, the oil and copper help with some things, but not with the curculios. I used to limit myself to those in my futile attempts to get a handle on rot and plum curculio (PC) damage. The copper may have helped some with the rot, but using those alone still meant near total loss of my fruits during the growing season. It was only by admitting defeat and using the pesticide/fungicide spray program during spring and summer that I was finally able to get a good harvest of stone fruit.
I did try baggies on the few apples that I had. It was just 5 or 6 fruit in all. That wound up being a total failure for me this year. Curculios got into the bags and hit the apples. They couldn’t find their way out and I’d find them trapped in the moisture in the morning. I may have wound up with more hits per apple that way, but at least I could crush the bugs inside the bag so that they wouldn’t get anything else.
Next year, if I have apples, I’ll be spraying those, too.
Muddy,
Are you sure they were PC? I have only found earwigs in baggies. I often think that PC and coddling moths are pretty dumb. I cut two big holes on the bottom of every bag, PC or CM have never found they way in them. Quite a number of earwigs made it. I have bags apples for 4-5 years now.
I hope my luck does not run out.
Yes this really is a discussion on fall/winter spraying. You spray for some insects , and fungi. Spring/summer spraying is a different beast. Scott covers the organic side good in this thread. I myself use Monterrey Fungi Fighter, and also Bonides Fruit Tree and Plant Guard. This is an all in one product and could be used without MFF in your spraying regime. It has some commercial pesticides not previously available to the home owner, probably in lower concentrations. I used both this year as i wanted to get good fruit for sure. And I got flawless fruit. No PC at all, no brown rot at all, No OFM, no thrips, etc. Maybe a bit extreme, although it worked really well! I may experiment more in future years, right now being new trees. I want to make them as invisible as possible to pests. As pests discover my yard, I will try and adapt.
I’ll try to look up the hort. oil and copper in local big boxes before going online. Luckily I did picked up a sprayer couple years ago thinking that I’ll need that one day! That day is coming soon! 
Tom
Tom,
Copper brand that is often mentoned is Kocide. It is copper hydroxide. I use Kocide 3000. There are other forms of copper, easier to find at big box stores. I had to order Kocide on line
Yes, mamuang, I’m sure they were PC. They were still alive and well and easily identifiable inside the bags. They probably came in through the tops since I didn’t know about making a cut for the stem at that time,and had just closed the zippers as closely as I could to the stems. I have evil earwigs getting in other things this summer, though. They seem to love zucchini, both the stems and fruits.
Muddy,
I showed the way I cut bags to someone. I think PC and CM do not how to fly from underneath. I hope they never learn how.
TomIL,
Horticultural oil and copper should be easy to find at Home Depot, large hardware stores and garden centers. Garden Centers that carry chemicals should be the first place to visit since the store employees might actually understand the products they are selling.
I read the label on the bottles for mixture amounts. Tom, there is a great website called doyourownpestcontrol.com They have everything you will need. 
This is an old thread, but I am beginning to have doubts about the effectiveness of surround on plum curculio (PC). I have heavy PC pressure, probably due to so many wild crabapples that keep a healthy population in place. Today, in broad daylight, I had a PC placing eggs in a plum. The plum and PC were heavily coated in surround. Apricots with a good coating of surround seem to be a PC magnet. I have no comparison or scientific method, but surround does not seem to be saving any of my fruit.
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There are at least 3 to 4 layers of surround on these trees. Fruit, stems, top of leaf, bottom of leaf, everything is covered. You can see the PC I am crushing in my fingers is coated in surround. She was still plugging along just fine. The apricots have nice PC slits right through the surround. It’s not like it protected a certain percentage of crop, it looks like it didn’t help at all. Peaches haven’t been touched, but everything else is pretty bad. Maybe user error?
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That is sad.
Surround doesn’t harm PC in any way, it just slows them down. They still lay lots and lots of eggs. On my Euro plums which are the most challenging to protect I lose about half the fruits. Fortunately it is about how many I would have needed to thin anyway so it doesn’t reduce the crop too much. How big are the trees? If a tree is small enough or the set is light enough they can get them all, but on a mature tree with a good set it should work well. This year I had a very light apricot set due to 19F at bloom. In my back orchard I am going to get almost no cots due to curc damage on the few remaining fruits.
In your case if there is enough of a wild population out of your control I could see how it might be too many for Surround to work effectively on. I am careful to pick up all fallen fruits to limit the number of curcs coming back next year.
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