North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

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

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