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nafex - [NAFEX] Surround experience this spring

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  • From: Scott Smith <scott@cs.jhu.edu>
  • To: nafex@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [NAFEX] Surround experience this spring
  • Date: Wed, 28 May 2008 18:37:29 -0400

I am continuing my Surround WP experiments on peaches apples plums apricots and quince. I posted about my last years experience awhile back and thought I would update that, also hoping to hear from other people using Surround.

Overall I did OK last year but still had a fair amount of curc damage on all fruits. I did not start spraying early enough. This year I started right after petal fall. I also paid attention to the rains and tried to keep a decent coat on, re-applying after a heavy rain. The main curc season is over here and it looks like I got nearly perfect control on the plums and peaches. On the apples I did not do quite as well, but I still had apples to spare after thinning the bad ones. I believe I made a spraying error with the apples, I was only targeting the fruit clusters to save myself time and spray, but I now think it is important to cover the whole tree so the curc is constantly pestered by the stuff wherever he happens to be. Also I had allowed some weeds to grow up under the apples and the weeds may have helped more curcs to overwinter right below the trees (not sure about that). I have now cleared out the weeds and am doing full tree sprays. I am hoping to have better results next year on the apples.

One nice thing about using Surround on the apples is any curc-damaged fruit gets a brown streak on it from the frass staining the Surround on the apple. It makes it very easy to spot the damaged fruits when thinning. Apples which have curc bites but no hole (a good enough apple for me) have no brown streak.

This has been a very rainy spring, three times the normal. I have had to spray on average once per week to keep a decent coat on. I am hoping that is way above average, it is quite a lot of spraying. I have not been trapping to detect populations but that is something I may want to start doing so I can minimize sprays. My peaches and plums have been unprotected recently because it looks like I am between OFM generations.

Thus far I have almost no moth damage on the fruits. I started adding spinosad to the Surround sprays not long after petal fall. There are a fair number of OFM tip strikes on the peaches however, so I expect I will be getting more moths in future generations to infect the fruit. (I was not spraying the peach shoot tips as well as I should have; again no fruit there so I was not paying enough attention to them.) I am going to try to keep up with the Surround enough to minimize the OFM and CM populations throughout the summer. I feel like I more or less have the Surround curculio program figured out, but am somewhat less certain on moth control.

Scott
6B/7A Maryland





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