North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

["Stephen Sadler" <Docshiva@Docshiva.org>]

I knew you were working on a pheromone trap.  I was hoping you’d post how that was working out.  Trapping for monitoring is a very good way to target your insecticide use.  For organic orcharding, I’m hoping something like the confusion lures for codling moth could be developed for pc; or traps that would trap out pc.

 

Thanks for the update and timing information.

 

~ Stephen

 

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From: nafex-bounces@lists.ibiblio.org [mailto:nafex-bounces@lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of dmnorton@royaloakfarmorchard.com
Sent: Tuesday, June 05, 2007 7:04 AM
To: North American Fruit Explorers
Subject: Re: [NAFEX] Curculio / Surround adhesion question

 

Stephen,

 

I devised a pheromone trap for plum curculio this season and it worked very well for us.  I trapped about a half dozen PC total, but one is all that is needed.  If you trap one, you know they are in your trees.  I placed 1 trap per block in our orchard for a total of 7 traps.   I trapped one PC in each trap and had ovipositing on 3 mm fruit from each of the trees where the traps were located.  The first PC appeared May 8 at 250 GDD when we were at pink.  Bloom was on May 12 and petal fall was May 18.  Our biofix for codling moth was May 10 and we hit threshold on May 18.  I found that plum curculio were in the orchard before bloom, so I could do my spray as soon as petal fall.  The traps showed me that the PC were in the trees about 2 - 3weeks before we had 3mm fruit.  Even without traps, the spray at petal fall is still the best defense against PC because they will usually enter your trees before bloom.  For now, we use a 2lb/acre rate of Imidan instead of the 4lb/acre rate for codling moth and use Rimon for codling moth.  Rimon is one of the newer growth inhibitors and is supposed to work on PC also.   

 

Dennis Norton
Royal Oak Farm Orchard
http://www.royaloakfarmorchard.com
http://www.theorchardkeeper.blogspot.com
http://www.revivalhymn.com