It has been a while since we had an ideal growing season. This year it was a mid-winder temp nose-dive that started problems and then an early summer monsoon. A brief drought was helpful but the excessive rain has returned. here in the CT, NY area where I manage my own and other orchards.
Excessive rain early in the season is supposed to cause split pits, but spring was pretty sunny and peaches and nects already looked deformed. I believe the winter cold damaged most of the ovaries but not quite enough to cause the trees to abort the fruit- just massive pit splits. Other sites in my neighborhood and further north lost their stone-fruit crop entirely. My J.plum crop was reduced but the Euros set adequately, but required little thinning. Oddly, my best setting J. plum was my Satsuma which usually suffers from early spring frosts more than Shiro or Reema, that did not bear nearly as much fruit. Elephant Heart was erased almost entirely. Lavina set pretty well, but Early Magic was virtually blank.
The return of excessive rain since about mid- August has really made a mess of my late peaches, bloating them with water and leaving them relatively bland. They aren’t good enough to make me proud to give away, but they are huge. Nectarines got up enough sugar but almost every fruit had split pits as did almost all peaches until late August.
Everything seems much more prone to rot whether or not there is fungicide on the surface. The rain is just too much and even fruit without split pits seem to be letting water in via the stem connection. Rot starts from the interior and works outward when on a normal season the reverse is true. When rot starts on the skin, fungicide can prevent it.
The approaching hurricane is supposed to be a tropical storm by landfall and it is not directly hitting us but it supposed to still bring about another inch of rain on our saturated ground. I’m running out of time to get the brix up in my main apple crop. Mediocrity will likely be the outcome. Too bad, I have a huge crop ripening as do most of my customers.
Sorry to hear of the deluges that have impacted your crops @alan . Here on the wet (west) coast of Canada we are experiencing another unusually dry summer. Weather patterns are definitely shifting, or so it seems.
Same here except that rain started around either mid or late July.
In addition to rot and split, my apples and pears, in particular, suffer serious sooty blotch and fly specks. Early fungicide spray did not help (4 sprays from May -early July).
Watermelons and veggies have responded well to frequent rain. All other fruit have suffered just like you said. So many rot on apples and so many split (and rot) on my Euro plums which was supposed to be a banner year.
French Improved has suffered the worst split, over 80% split while hanging on the tree and yellow jackets have had a field day.
Yes, that was the first long wet spell that broke in about late July, I think, but the rain returned in late August. We had over 4" last week.
I don’t remember the dates all that clearly, but I do remember that for a few weeks of August peaches and nects got better, although Silver Gem managed to do well without a lot of rot. Artic Glo and Jade rotted like crazy and were relatively worthless. Jade didn’t ripen evenly with the few fruit that didn’t split and rot before even getting there.
I’m sorry to hear about your fruit issues. That’s really tough to deal with.
I do doubt your thesis about the cause of split pits. To me that seems highly unlikely. Unless you can find some reference to that happening it just doesn’t seem likely to me.
I’ve had a lot of spring freeze injury over 50 years with no split pit issues.
I’m talking about -7 F in February after preceding mild temps and I know a piece of fruit likely to have a split pit by the shape, it’s pretty obvious because they are more oblong than those without. The shape appeared long before our wet weather did in June. I believe it is early spring wet weather that causes split pits but were didn’t have a wet early spring.
You have to experience split pit issues to begin to understand them. If I was of a more scientific bent, I would have cut open some of the fruit as soon as I saw the suggestive shape, but I had other things on my mind when I was thinning fruit.
I’ve had a bit of split pit on early peaches in my GH. I can’t explain yours. I just think it’s unlikely that a winter or spring freeze would be just bad enough to damage the ovary in such a way as to cause split pits but not kill the bud. I’ve never heard of that scenario before and doubt that you have either. You’ve got an issue and are casting a net around in search of a cause. That’s understandable but not likely cause and effect.
Borderline freezes happen every year winter and spring in a multitude of places without split pit issues. Something else is going on. It’s probably one or a combination of the normal causes even though they don’t seem likely.
Did you have a light crop load due to the freezes?
I am trouble shooting and I’m pretty good at it. The literature doesn’t say anything about the ovaries being more sensitive to cold than the male flower parts, but experience has made me pretty certain that is the case. The literature does say that split pits are sometimes the result of excess water but here is what my AI robot has to say about the possibility of extreme cold causing split pits.
“Severe cold temperatures during winter can potentially cause split pits in stone fruit, although it is not the most common cause of this issue.”
Have you noticed that fruit with split pits tends to be slightly deformed with peaches taking on a more squat shape. We had a normal spring but as soon as the fruit got past marble size the defects were apparent.
You really are not in a good position to evaluate my diagnosis and if I’d taken pictures of the very immature fruit I think it would have opened your eyes.
I should add that nearby neighbors got no stonefruit crop at all even though a couple of them are in slightly warmer sites on the average winter night, but on our coldest night this year it was breezy so temps were probably the same there, but the buds apparently were not quite as hardened off because of the slight difference of warmer average night temps leading up to the deep dive. So the ovaries of their stone fruit were completely killed to the point of crop failure. It’s actually a pretty obvious deduction that my slightly harder buds were not quite damaged enough to destroy the crop on many of my peach and plum trees, but it did destroy a lot of the buds on many of the trees and all of them on some. It did enough damage to the ovaries to cause split pits.
At sites just a few degrees warmer further south, they got the same rain but not the split pits.
Now does it make sense?
It helps when you are managing scores of orchards in different locations. In one year I am getting the experience equivalent of many seasons and comparisons a single site grower can never experience. The only comparable experience probably occurs for consultants that provide advice for lots of different commercial orchards.
But much of the time we cannot know what we want to know for sure. It’s a fun exercise to try to figure these mysteries out as best we can.
That is a really cool thought. You can actually see how the weather of a location impacts stuff because you do the same thing at multiple places with different weather.
Much of modern statistical inference is based on people who did different farming or plant trials at the same location. So the weather is the constant and you can see the effect of fertilizer or watering or a new seed type. Then, most of the big easily discoverable stuff was done and people have moved on to other things.
The next step would be to look at the effect of weather/pests combined with various practices (statisticians call this interaction). That’s a lot of the research focus now -how to cope with drought, insects, etc. But you need a lot more data because there are two different variables (the farming practice + the weather/pest condition).
For me, I will never REALLY know if it’s something I did that is causing the condition of my trees and fruit or if it is the weather/pests that year.
