North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

["William C. Garthright" <billg@inebraska.com>]

> Growers here have long since abandoned  myclobutanyl for BR control 
> and Cornell only recommends it to control blossom blight which I've 
> never seen in 20 years- even on unsprayed trees.  Indar or Orbit are 
> much more affective SI's for this purpose as I understand it and with 
> them I harvest stone fruit on the wettest years without much BR loss.  
> Pristine is the new kid on the block for this purpose.   Bumper is a 
> cheaper generic version of Orbit.


None of these are available for backyard growers, though, are they? I 
can rarely find the fungicides recommended for most of this stuff, so I 
have to use what I CAN get.

I've had a lot of rot (at least some of which is brown rot, I believe) 
on my plums, peaches, and, especially, nectarines this year. I don't 
know if it's getting worse (this is only my second year with fruit, and 
I only had a little last year), or if it's just the weather. Although 
it's been a dry year here, and we're far short of our normal moisture 
(which isn't too great, even in normal years), we had a very cool July 
and there's been a lot of sprinkles of rain. So everything has stayed 
wet, without really giving us enough rain for any useful purpose.

So I suspect that the fruit rot is unusually bad this year. And my 
peaches didn't seem to ripen well - many of them had no taste - so I 
left them on the tree as long as I could. That's meant that a lot of 
them were overripe and even more prone to rot. Oh, well, I still had far 
more than I could eat myself - and enough to give away to the neighbors, 
relatives, and anyone who cared enough to pick some up (I don't deliver 
- heh, heh). But I think maybe they would prefer hotter, dryer weather 
as in our normal summers.

Bill
Lincoln, NE (zone 5)

--
I never cease being dumbfounded by the unbelievable things people 
believe. - Leo Rosten