Thanks, Levers. I have already sprayed Kocide in late fall. I could wait to spray it again around bud break.
So this time, I may just spray Surround. That’s easy since I don’t need to put on my hazmat gears. If it rains tomorrow as they say, I may have to wait to Sun.
Many peach growers in Southern Illinois use 50-50 exterior white Latex/water mixed with Lorisban on their peach trunks for borers and the paint for sun scald. I wonder if it also delays bloom a little? I did this last year for peaches and plums.
I had a zillion peach tree borer flies in traps. The U of I etymologist recommends removing borer flies from the traps with a tweezers every so often, which I didn’t do last year. My traps were black. I’ll remember my tweezers this year.
You can also delay bloom to some extent by erecting some kind of temporary shade for the tree in late winter/early spring. Obviously just not very practical on a large scale.
So I’m resurrecting this old thread, because to my knowledge, no one on the forum has ever reported on using diluted white paint to try to delay bloom of peach trees. I don’t know @scottfsmith did you ever give it a try?
I decided to give it a try. I had been reluctant to try it in the past because of the potential expense. Also in the past it seemed like peaches were more of a regular crop here. The new trend seems to be one of not so regular. Last year we only got a 20% peach crop. The year before was nothing. This year doesn’t look necessarily good. We’ve had a very mild winter overall. Mild winters tend to force early bloom. Early bloom has a higher risk of frost damage.
So I decided to finally experiment with light colored latex paint. I ended up buying about 4.5 gal. of light colored (misprint or oops paint). It was 10 bucks per gallon. As I recall the study that Michelle Warmund conducted used a dilution ratio of 1:1.
So my first pass at this I used all the 4.5 gal. of paint and about that much water. It turns out this is way too much paint. It wanted to clog my sprayer (pto sprayer) or clog the wand I was using. I used about all that mixture up and then added probably another 3 gallon of water, so maybe 13 gal total? My guess is you could dilute the latex paint using 75% water and 25% paint, or dilute it even further. More experimentation is needed in that regard.
I ended up coating 5 trees total, which ended up being 3 different varieties of peaches. The varieties in each case have some control (untreated) trees right next to them of the same variety as the treated trees.
I know the sample size is small, but since the trees are right next to untreated trees, I should be able to get some useful information. I didn’t want a larger sample because I don’t know what this light colored paint will do to the trees (kill them possibly?) I sprayed the whole tree, not just the trunks.
I sprayed them sometime around Feb. 7th after we had already had a significant amount of warm weather. I’m thinking it would be better to spray them as soon as they went dormant for maximum delay of bloom, but I didn’t get too it in time. I didn’t use white paint because the big box store didn’t have any white oops paint, so I picked out light colored paint.
Here’s a pic of a couple trees I painted. Up close they actually look pretty cool, but I don’t have a real close up pic right now.
Looking forward to hearing about your results.
Up here in MT we had a long spell of 50 degrees temps in January that if slightly longer would’ve caused the trees to bloom. Now of course it’s back down to 15 degrees lows regularly. It seems the trees passed the test this year, barely, but painting and/or shading the stone fruit is getting tempting. I’m a little hesitant as my trees are backyard trees and have landscaping value too.
Maybe tell your neighbors you planted white birch?
I’m really interested to see your results! Please keep us posted.
I planted my jplums on a north slope just off the ridge top … which is supposed to make them bloom later.
My AU Rosa is always first to start… and I found it doing this yesterday.
If the north slope is causing it to delay… it is not enough delay.
I am going to graft over it with alderman, waneta, superior… which do bloom later.
It would be nice to know if the white paint works. I could do that too.
TNHunter
Wow you did paint the whole tree. I hope this works. My plum trees needs to be delayed.
Somehow I missed this thread earlier. Delaying bloom by a week would be very useful in my climate. We have a predicted low of 22 coming up Monday, probably our last freeze of the year, after a couple of weeks of warm weather. Some of my trees will be in full bloom. This is an issue nearly every year.
I’ve never had blossoms killed by frost here in the PNW, but I this thread gives me an idea. I have a yellow fuzzy female kiwi that blooms too early for proper pollination because my only male is a green fuzzy. If I can delay the female’s blooming time by a week or two, they would be a better match. I can’t spray because the female vine is growing on a trellis right on a south-facing house wall; so, I think that I’ll try shading the female vine.
Two weeks is more than i would have guessed. Probably surreal looking with white painted trees. A heavy coat of surround is surreal enough on its own.
Under most conditions I’d also doubt two weeks delay What would be even more effective is evaporative cooling. But that’s difficult to implement, takes a lot of water, and may result in excessively wet soil. The idea is to keep the buds wet by misting or spraying in spring whenever the air temp is above about 40F.
Shading should be as effective as white paint.
