North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

["Alan Haigh" <alandhaigh@gmail.com>]

Ok, ok, I'll be sure to edit more carefully when mentioning anything about plant-breeding around NAFEXers!  Should have known to be more careful on this message board.  Anyway can we get back to my original question?  I'm trying to develop a list of plum curculio resistant apple cultivars.  This is not a subject much research has gone into, unfortunately, so I guess anecdotal observation will have to suffice.

 

I'm also curious about brown-rot resistance in stone-fruit.  This is going to be very regionally specific, I'm afraid, but maybe we can all learn something.  I have read that the Seneca plum is resistant but not found this to be true.  I have observed that in peaches older varieties seem to have more resistance.  Encore, Autumn Glo and Lady Nancy tend to rot without significant protection but Elberta and Belle of Georgia do not.

 

In southeastern NY earlier ripening stone-fruit that face less heat and humiditity suffer less from brown-rot and peaches less from scab.

So many of the newer peaches are highly susceptible to brown-rot that I think we should limit the discussion to what's resistant, not what's not, unless it's a variety that seems to exist to rot.  In newer peaches, varieties from the Harrow series are evaluated for brown-rot resistance but they are falling out of popularity.

 

One more thing, in my region Japanese plums are much more PC resistant than the Europeans.  I often get useful plums from unsprayed Japanese varieties in my nursery where the only insecticide I use is for borers on the trunks of peaches.  I'm guessing that the Japanese varieties are growing so rapidly when PC arrives they crush the worms.  Does anyone out there have a more researched opinion?