North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

[Scott Smith <scott@cs.jhu.edu>]

Richard, I have used Surround for several years, but only intensely  
for one year.  Here is my preliminary impressions of it in my backyard  
Maryland orchard.

It definitely helps with the curculio.  I did not do the best job of  
spraying (primarily I started a bit too late on the apples).  A few  
apple varieties which formed fruits early got hit badly, but all the  
other fruits fared pretty well.  I am going to need a few more years  
to be sure it is working, but my initial impression that I will be OK  
using Surround as my only curculio control method -- some fruit were  
hit, but after thinning those out I had either a good set or an  
overset on nearly all trees.

I find it effective for control of Japanese beetles (and also on  
cucumber beetles; not flea beetles however).  The Japanese beetles  
love my grapes, but the combination of Surround with some hand-control  
takes care of them.  Before using the Surround it was a whole lot more  
work with the hand control.

For control of moths on apples, peaches and plums I have been using a  
combination of Surround with spinosad.  On some trees this gave  
excellent control, on most it was reasonable, and on a few I still had  
a good number of worms.  I am going to be working on this in the  
coming year to see if I can get it to work better.

On the plums I had a problem getting enough coverage since the spray  
would bead up; I added a touch of soap and that improved things there  
a bit.  Coverage was still not nearly as good as on the other fruits.

The peaches had to be scrubbed pretty heavily to get the Surround off.

I also had a big moth problem on my cherries this past year which I  
had not treated with anything.  I am going to add them to my Surround/ 
spinosad spray program next year and see if that helps.

Scott