Good question Cousinfloyd!
I wonder did all the pollution over the years, cause us to have to use so many pesticides and insecticides? In any case, I will keep my eyes on the forum to see if there is an answer to your question. Have a great weekend! No matter what-eating quality peaches is our ultimate goal.

In the early 1800's none of the major insect pests of peaches had made it to the US. Around 1840 the peachtree borer showed up. The plum curculio is a native pest but it took many generations before it adapted to feeding on peaches. Early control of plum curculio was to shake the trees or hit the trees with a mallet, and catch the curcs on a sheet below. OFM showed up around 1915. Early sprays for OFM/curc were nasty things like arsenate of lime and lead arsenate. Its an interesting history, one I have only learned from reading old fruit books and seeing what they were using when.

Scott

Quite possibly the expectations differed. Today people seem to expect blemish free fruits and free of insects. I rather doubt that in the 1800s it was disturbing to people to cut part of the fruit off as 'bad'. I know when I was growing up in rural Arkansas, that was the way of things.
It was nothing to have to cut the apple open (for instance) and remove the part of apple the coddling worm had been burrowing in. In other cases (particularly us youngsters), you just bit in and took your chances. After all, it's just additional protein and it won't hurt you.

one might think.. a good crop back then ... was one one farm ... or various isolated farms ....

where today.. they talk about farms covering miles squared ...

in other words... the monoculture of large scale production brings in large scale IPM problems ...

pure speculation ....

ken

They grew on massive scales then too.

1) There was less pressure as Scott said.
2) They DID have very effective pesticides...it was just nasty stuff though...it killed everything and the lead arsenates are still killing to this day. Fungicides ..not so much though, but they did have and utilize them.
3) Expectations were indeed WAY lower, as was typical yield. Labor represented a lesser percentage of overall cost then for many tasks. So some insects were literally hand picked and more eyes watching the fruit. Today that wouldn't be feasible at all.

> They DID have very effective pesticides...it was just nasty stuff though...it killed everything and the lead arsenates are still killing to this day. Fungicides ..not so much though, but they did have and utilize them.

In the 1800's? Was it that early? There must have been a time before any such pesticides? Were there no commercial orchards peach orchards in Georgia (or other similar climates) before that time?

If OFM didn't show up until around 1915 that definitely explains some things, but what about brown rot? Appleseed, you said there weren't really fungicides in the 1800's. I'm pretty sure Georgia peaches were being shipped up North well before 1900. I can't imagine they were shipping peaches to New York with brown rot. But how could they have avoided it?

I assume the method of catching plum curcs on a sheet would be just as practicable today as it was then (at least apart from different ideas of the value of labor/time)? I wonder if there are any modern references to the practice in organic circles.

Floyd, thats a good question about brown rot. It doesn't seem to get much mention as being a big problem until the mid 1800s. Like the curc it may have taken some generations for the native disease to mutate to be more of a problem on peaches. Organisms are never fixed, they are always adapting. See attached booklet from 1932 below, read the history section at the start. My reading of it is in the mid-1800s brown rot made things a lot worse for peach/plum growing; here is a quote from an 1855 writer from that booklet:
The plum crop, of late years, has generally failed In northern Ohio. The result has been charged to the curculio, and in many instances correctly ; but a fatal disease has been insidiously progressing among our fruit orchards which has done more injury than that insect. The effect of the two evils has not usually been discriminated one from the other. Indeed few cultivators seem to be aware of the prevalence of any such disease.

(the disease is brown rot, hard to tell from this fragment) The "of late years"/"progressing" in particular makes me think things were getting a lot worse in this period. The booklet also mentions how brown rot destroyed a high fraction of the US peach crop in some years. It also sounds like in the later 1800s and early 1900s resistance to brown rot became a key feature of peach breeding, this is one way things got better. I certainly have noticed a wide variance in resistance amongst varieties.

Re: modern organic growers controlling curc, I have heard of a few using the sheet method but it is very time-consuming. Devices were once made to make it easier, the sheet was tied to sticks and formed an upside-down umbrella and could be wheeled from tree to tree. Another old-fashioned method I have heard being used again is to let chickens roam under the trees - they will get a large fraction of the curcs. Fortunately Surround is now an excellent control and is not all that much work since significant spraying is needed in the spring for other things already.

Scott

Edit: I'm still reading this booklet, I found it some time ago but didn't realize all the good stuff in it. Apparently 1905 is when lime-sulphur was first discovered as a control for brown rot, and 1915 was when powdered sulphur was discovered. This 1932 book lists those as the main controls. From my own experiences you can do reasonably well with sulphur alone, assuming you have disease-resistant varieties and are diligent about regular spraying.

Here is a link that might be useful: booklet

This post was edited by scottfsmith on Sat, Jan 10, 15 at 11:06

Scott, thanks very much for taking the time to share these things.

I'm going to ask a question here that's probably very basic, but I don't know how else to find the answer. I assume that insects injure and provide points of entry for brown rot to start doing its thing. Is that the case? If so, I wonder if a significant part of the explanation for the ability of pre-fungicide-using growers to grow peaches is that brown rot had a hard time getting started before PC and OFM were major problems. I probably don't know enough about peaches for my speculations to even be a productive part of this discussion, but I'll risk sharing those thoughts anyways.

Yes, insects and PC in particular does a huge favor for brown rot. In fact I use rot as a sign for fruits containing PC that I need to cull while still hanging on the tree - a spot of rot in June more often than not means a PC is inside of a plum.

That said, I have seen many trees laden with peaches with no bug damage turn into mush-filled spore zones - I don't think PC and OFM are the only cause, it seems like brown rot also got worse over the years. But, thats just my guess.

Scott