Scott-

I think i've got a little better hang of this Surround. I know i was too late on the apricots and they got dinged VERY early by PC. It must have been a very early hatch of them or something, but i know it had to be them because the markings are very noticeable. We had a top 10 record warm March/April followed by some real cool late April/early May and now its jumped to summer so PC should be all over. I don't think i have much issues with CM/OFM. I do have a horrible time with 2 beetles (Rose chafers/Japanese beetles) which will start coming in about 2 weeks. So i'll have to keep sprays up since they feed on foilage and fruit. I have noticed that Surround doesn't seem to adhere as well to nectarines/sweet cherries/plums? The peaches seem to get coated nicely and i'm guessing its the fuzz, same with the apricots. I've put a heavy layer on my Superior plums anyways which get blasted by PC and beetles. One of my plums i have just left as a trap crop because it has set very few fruit and they aren't that great to begin with.

I never had to touch all 3 apple trees with Surround because they sized up enough during that cold spell so i could go right to bagging. Looks like a perfect crop of them if i can keep the tree rats away.

Maybe i should be adding an oil?

Apricot
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Superior Plum
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Alderman Plum (PC damage)
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Scott,

I sprayed Surround about 3 times after petal fall on the apples and stone fruit. It does not give total control of PC; there is still a significant number of fruit with PC damage, but once I thinned there were still plenty of fruit -- at least for my purposes. My feeling, however, is that Surround does not give a lot of control of OFM. I sprayed it on my nectarine and peach, but started to get signs of OFM strikes on the fruit and moved on to the big guns with permethrin. By this time my apples were bagged and safe from insect pests. Next year I don't think I'll bother with Surround on the stone fruit at all but will use permethrin the whole way. An alternative would be Spinosad, but it is registered for too few applications to control OFM all the way to ripening except on fruit that ripens very early.

aust-

How are you mixing? Ratio? I think sometimes mine comes out real thick, while other times it comes out too thin (or so it seems). Its probably because my sprayer sucks. I also only mix small amts because i don't have many trees.

Frank, thats awesome coverage on that 'cot! I hardly ever get completely perfect coverage like that. I have been using 3 cups per gallon when I was starting over or had major loss and 2 cups per gallon as the normal level.

Aust, I agree the Surround is not doing a whole lot for OFM, but I do feel it is doing something and when you are chipping away at it from multiple different angles you will make progress. In other words if there are four moths and Surround gets one, disruption causes one not to be born, spinosad nails one, and tip pruning gets the last one, we did it! The Surround alone only got one of the four so that alone would be a dismal failure. At some point I may decide this approach is too much of a pain but I do keep getting a bit better every year. For the spinosad, there is enough generation timing you can do to minimize the number of sprays by focusing on generation points, and also swap for Bt every now and then. For my apples I also have granulosis to throw into the rotation.

Scott

Scott: the info I read on mating disruption and traps indicates that very small orchards (like my 11 apple trees and one peach) are not sufficiently large to effectively use the traps and disruption pheromones in. How large an orchard are you using these methods in?

Michael, my orchard is spread over my yard which is about an acre. I never saw a good explanation of why small orchards are problematic. I did see something about how neighboring fruit trees that do not have disruption can be a problem and it could be the moths coming from adjacent lots could dominate and make disruption useless. On the other hand if you have no neighbors with fruit trees maybe disruption will work OK on just a few trees - ? For my 1 acre the guy at Great Lakes IPM felt that disruption should work.

Scott

Scott, good work, especially on the mating disruption angle. CM is the biggest problem with my 2 Imidan spray approach, which you would consider nuclear but compared to commercial growers around here is more like a sling-shot.

Even though I stop spraying a couple weeks after petal fall CM is only a problem on a few varieties at this point but the mating disruption gives me another option which I had long ignored because of stated status quo assumption.

I have a man doing Surround applications with oil and will let you know if I learn anything new once I evaluate the sites.

It really is a shame that the permithrin baited traps for OFM came off the market. Populations on my property have never recovered from it and I get very little flagging. They never did much damage to fruit but made a real mess of my nursery trees.