North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

[Steve <sdw12986@aol.com>]

Oh, so THAT'S where all my plum curculios went this year!
Normally I try to spray my plums (most are American Hybrids but a few 
are Europeans)three times with Imidan. This year, I sprayed once and 
watched. Usually I get a fair amount of hits, even with the sprays. When 
it was time for the 2nd spray this year, I was seeing nothing. Finally, 
one tree had a branch with 6 or 8 hits. I waited. Another 6 or 8 hits 
near the first one. I waited. That was it. Never saw another scar, not 
even on the apples and they didn't get insecticide of any kind this 
entire season!
For the apples, that's about to come to an end. I put out 4 of the red 
sticky apples a month ago and only saw an occasional apple maggot fly. 
They were collecting quite a few innocent bugs so I put out 2 more fresh 
sticky balls a few days ago. This evening, one of the new balls had 
collected 4 apple maggot flies and the other had a few too. I think I'll 
do a spray of Sevin. I would have done it tonight but I saw rain coming 
and it's raining now.
Back to the curculios. Since I had so few hits this year (this was truly 
unusual), I decided that the one or 2 females that found me were NOT 
going to reproduce. I found every plum with a scar on it. Most were 
thrown onto the street, nearby, where they would be crushed repeatedly 
by car tires. A few were plums that were sizing up well and had only one 
scar on the very tip. I took a knife and cut the tip, with scar, off but 
left the plum on the tree. I was looking for those the other day and 
found a couple large, nearly ripe, plums with just a little scar on the 
end. I think it worked.  :-)


Steve in the Adirondacks (zone 4 in a good year)... where the season's 
first American Hybrid plums are just about to be ripe!

Alan Haigh wrote:
> I realize that not a lot of participants to this list attempt growing 
> Euro plums in plum curculio territory but maybe someone can pitch in 
> something experientially to my question. 
>  
> I attempt to grow fruit in southeastern NY with a very low spray 
> schedule that includes 2 applications of Imidan beginning about when the 
> Jonagold apple looses its flowers (petal fall) and finishing 10-14 days 
> later.  Many seasons, most sites, this works well for all the varieties 
> of fruit I manage. 
>  
> However in my own orchard I am having increasing losses of Euro plums to 
> PC every year.  For the last couple of weeks many of my Valor and 
> Victory plums have been coloring up early and cutting them open reveals 
> flesh beginning to rot and in about a third of the damaged fruit single 
> small PC larvae.  This is the first year where I'm really losing a 
> significant amount of fruit.
>  
> My question is, do I need to tighten my schedule or extend it.  I never 
> see the PC on the fruit and I never find any larvae in J. plums, 
> nectarines, apples or anything else I grow.  I realize that the apples 
> would likely crush the larvae but I would assume that there is another 
> reason that I am only having issues with my Euro plums.  My hunch is 
> that I need to extend the schedule just because I get no damage on the 
> J. plums which begin flowering at least a week earlier.  However there 
> was quite a bit of rain between sprays so wash-off may have been an 
> issue- but why not for other fruit?