Floyd, see the attached for someone who uses chickens for PC control. Spring seems to be the best time. Also he mentions smack the trunks in the early morning and the chickens will chomp on the pests -- no need for the sheet!

I have heard mixed reports on how well chickens ducks etc can be used to control PC and OFM. Surely you will reduce the population, but its hard to say by how much. They can overwinter outside the orchard so the only time the chickens will be able to get those is when the fruit drops. With enough PC control you could basically let the PC do the natural thinning for you, and the only problem will be OFM worms in the fruits -- OFM are better than PC in that you at least get some mature peach flesh to eat.

Re: brown rot, even resistant varieties can get a lot of rot. The same goes for bacterial spot, no peach is immune, some just get less than others. I would say its not earlier peaches but more resistant ones to go for. Clayton and Winblo are two of my favorite disease-resistant peaches. You should also consider an early apricot like Tomcot, its early enough to escape the worst of the rot.

So, if you like big experiments, go for it! If you want something more certain, get out the sprayer.

Scott

Here is a link that might be useful: chickens for PC

This past summer, I got a bit of brown rot on PF1, but it wasn't too bad. It just isn't a very good peach. For its season it may be good, but Tomcot ripens at the same time for me and is far better. To put a number on it, the brix comparison is something like 10 vs 17. I haven't seen any rot yet on Tomcot in the 2 years I've gotten fruit. The biggest problem I've had is that it is tasty to the animals in my yard as well.

I had Winblo in a pot and it set a heavy crop with no brown rot. Of course, potted trees are a bit more open than normal in-ground trees, so that probably helped too. You'd probably want to do enough pruning to keep them pretty open and have good airflow.

The only thing I've been spraying is surround, but I didn't find it all that effective. I'm not sure if I'll move more toward spraying harder stuff, or individually bagging fruits.

I may try to get minimal spraying working, while protecting a portion of the crop with bags. I've used zip-locks on apples, but not peachs. My father however had great success this past year with zip-locked peaches. But, his trees are small and I'm not sure if they would have been OK anyways. I've tried a bit with cloth bags, but they've been pretty frustrating to apply.

I think growing them in a pot might be a good ticket. At least you could move them out of the rain when they get close to ripe and the root restriction would help with the rot also- root restricted peaches may be less watery and less foliage will lead to better sun exposure.

Here, most years the earliest peaches are least likely to get rot, but it also depends on weather nearing ripening- so good to have a spread.

I usually get Harrow Diamonds without bothering with a fungicide spray.

I've noticed that Harcrest, Madison, and Elberta are resistant for late varieties here. I used to have a client who regularly harvested no-spray peaches from his Harcrest, but this fine peach is hard to come by.

Eastern exposure is essential- gets the dew off early. Summer pruning helps also- keep the trees as open as possible.

I don't know how far PC can fly, but CM can fly close to a mile. So success depends a lot on local reservoirs of the bugs. Chickens work well in Washington state, that is, in the desert. There is little vegetation limiting their scratching, and their is little inflow from the surroundings.

Even then, organic orchards only have 90% good fruit. I wonder if this can be improved by providing trap sites for the grubs to hibernate (piles of leaves or chips), which the chickens can thoroughly comb through.

Thank you all very much for the personalized advice.

I need to think on the peach questions some more, but in the meantime, can I really put any hope in no-spray apricots (even relative to my marginal hope for peaches)? I would be equally interested in apricots if I thought there were comparable hope, but I've never heard of anyone that's ever gotten even a bite of no-spray apricot from a tree in this area (whereas I know of some extremely marginal successes with peaches, albeit so marginal that most people consider them total failures). I did plant an apricot tree when I first moved to where I am now 7 years ago. I planted a Harglow because it was advertized as late blooming to avoid late spring frosts (although that recommendation came from the nursery selling it, which I've since come to consider a pretty worthless category of advice, especially coming from the kind of nurseries trying to sell the masses what they think they want.) My Harglow has always either failed to set fruit or aborted very soon afterwards. I don't think the fruit has ever been there long enough for insects or disease to come into play. Is there any reason to think a Tomcot would do better? Is my Harglow not actually self-pollinating as advertized? I have yet to have a year (at least not since the apricot started flowering) when there wasn't some kind of frost after bloom time, but I've had other fruits make all the same (apples, Asian pears, sour cherries, peaches that subsequently succumbed to brown rot...) I'd love to think there was hope in another apricot variety, but why would a Tomcot do any better than my Harglow?

Harglow does flower a bit later than other varieties, but rarely late enough to make the difference here. Never had it crop when others were frosted out- all or none.

Tomcot seems to be the first choice in your region, but cots are always dicey where late frosts are common.

Floyd, early peaches may be better in general than they have been for me. I didn't notice much difference. But, I don't have any of the super early ones.

Apricots are very location dependent w.r.t. spring freezes. I have not lost any cots in over a dozen years from freezes. It sounds like you are getting late freezes on your cots.

Harvestman makes a good point about eastern exposure - the early sun beating back the dew makes a huge difference. Also open pruning really helps.

Scott

I'm not sure if it can be done at your site, but it seems that it is at least possible in the south. I'm not sure how much planting on the north side of a house or evergreens helps, but I see that advice repeated again and again online. Maybe it would make a difference for you. I suppose it could also help keep the tree warm during a marginal frost.

I think brown rot in peaches is very variety and site specific. I never get it with my peaches, and only some apples. Winblo seems to be very immune as is Harvester and the entire Prince series. Although chickens may help with OFM & PC, they have to dig into the fallen fruit, in order to get the larvae,and how many chickens are going to do that. Furthermore, unless your chickens roost in your trees, they will be little help aggainst borers.

Rayrose, young peach trees are less likely to get brown rot on fruit. I've found it can take years here before BR becomes a big factor,

I agree with most of what you are saying but I wonder how long you've been growing those peaches on your site, just to have some idea of what kind of trees you are talking about- very mature, mature or young.

My experience has been that sites and varieties can seem really good for lack of brown rot, until they aren't.

Harrow Station used to be the only breeding program on the continent that looked closely at brown rot susceptabilty on stone fruit. Has that changed?

Hman,

My peach trees vary from 3 - 8 years old, and i don't allow them to carry fruit until the fifth year, so that's plenty of time for brown rot to develop. As I've mentioned in various posts, you can do a lot to prevent brown rot, not only by choosing more resistant varieties, but also in practicing good orchard hygiene. Here, in the south, nobody has even heard of harrow station. Our sources are Clemson and the USDA at Byron, Ga.

Ray, the fruit is the main propagation engine for the spores, so you were not propagating spores for those first five years the trees were not bearing, only the 0-3 years they were bearing. So, wait several more years before evaluating your long-term susceptibility to brown rot.

Scott

"Harrow Station used to be the only breeding program on the continent that looked closely at brown rot susceptabilty on stone fruit. Has that changed?"

Not that I'm aware. As you know, breeding programs are pretty much all geared toward commercial production. Also as you've mentioned before, brown rot is generally easily controlled with a few fungicide sprays (especially with some of the newer more targeted fungicides) so I don't see a strong incentive to breed for BR resistance in new programs. I believe I've read of one or two programs which list BR resistance as a criteria of their breeding program, but I suspect they only reject the most susc. varieties.

Here, for a very early variety PF1 is almost bullet proof for BR, but it has some quality issues. Earlystar is the best early BR resistant peach which has consistent quality.

That said, I've got a couple Harrow Diamonds, but not fruited them yet. I've gone out on a limb and made quite a few copies of the Harrow Diamond last fall, and plan to make a few more this spring. I'd like to have a good non-patented peach for this window. I think I can deal with the "leggy" nature of the tree, as Hman has mentioned.

Olpea, if you want to try a new patented variety I like, I've been impressed with the sweetness and size of Desiree for such an early peach.

Harrow Diamond shouldn't be a problem for you as you aren't starved for space, so if a big empty hole develops inside the tree after 6 or 7 seasons of fruit you'll still probably find them worth keeping for another 5 or 6 years. I've been having better luck with them by staying on top of summer pruning anyway- always working to keep them compact and avoid shading inside the tree.

PF 1 has decent sugar for something so early, but it seems to be very small even with prompt thinning. Candor never gets enough sugar here to be really worth eating to me.

Rayrose, you didn't ask, but 8 years seems an awful long time to wait for a peach to bear. Even those tiny sticks that often come from Tennessee nurseries should be bearing pretty good crop by the fourth year if the soil is good.

I expect my first small crop by the 3rd year, and my season is shorter than yours- and I usually don't even irrigate my trees.

Hman,

Thanks for the heads up on some of the attributes of these varieties. I've already planted Candor, but just one tree.

I have several Desiree, so it's good to know its quality is good, at least in the Northeast.

This post was edited by olpea on Mon, Jan 12, 15 at 16:49

Hman

I didn't say 8 years I said 5 years. Sure the tree is going to fruit a lot sooner than that, but in most cases, the quality of the fruit isn't worth risking the overall growth and development of the tree. If you allow the tree to devote all of its energy into growing, you'll get a much stronger tree that will produce more and better quality fruit in the long run, and might I add, will be more disease resistant. This applies to any fruit tree.
But some people have to have instant gratification, no matter how it effects the long term productivty and health of the tree.

Ray, sorry, that was careless reading on my part.

Peaches can provide some crop without slowing growth too much and I disagree that young trees have inferior fruit, I find the opposite is often true. It is surprising how often our experiences differ- but I do respect your experience, you get good use of your trees.

I've heard commercial growers (ACN sales rep told me) in your region generally rely on crop by the third year- if it significantly slowed the trees I doubt they'd allow it to happen.

There's a big difference between back yard growers and commercial growers. Commercial growers have access to many chemicals, fertilizers, labor, and equipment, that aren't available to back yard growers. Plus they have a much different incentive than we do. So, you can't really make a fair comparison.