Mytrees:

You have a serious infestation of oriental fruit moth. The gouges may be something else, perhaps birds or some other insect, but the overriding problem is OFM. It is a problem for many, if not most of us on stone fruits. Some years the OFM ia worse than others. This is a bad year for you. OFM and other insects become active as soon as night temperatures warm up to 60F or so.

You are correct that even one sting from the OFM, characterized by the pectin blobs, ruins the peach and it will rot before it falls off.

You should be spraying on a weekly basis early in the season while the skins are tender with an effective insecticide like permethrin. Imidan will work too, but is hard to obtain and I don't think as good for this application.

One alternative to constant spraying is installation of shoe store try-on "footies" on the little peaches, leaving them on until the fruit is ripe or nearly ripe. These little nylon pouches will protect the peaches from OFM and other insects such as the plum curculio, but you may have to spray several times just to get the peaches up to a size for thinning and bagging.

Bagging fruit has been extensively discussed in the past here, so I won't go into further detail, since you should be able to find info using "bagging fruit" as keywords.

Don Yellman, Great Falls, VA

Any suggestions on spraying this season? Based on some of the material I've now read, the moth damages the tree itself, too.

This is the fourth year for my little orchard, and I've noticed that I'm breeding a bigger insect population each year. I've never sprayed a tree, but it seems clear that I need to reassess my insect response plan.

Mytrees:

I gave you a suggestion on spraying. Permethrin. Yes, the moth can also damage the branch tips. But if all of your peaches have at least one little pectin blob or more, it is over for this season.

Remove all damaged peaches from the trees and send them out in the trash. They will soon contain larvae, hatched from the eggs laid on the surface, and if allowed to fall to the ground will form your new population of oriental fruit moth for next season. Orchard cleanup, especially of fallen fruit, is a very important part of orchard maintenance.

I am all for organic growing when it can be done, but I can't do it. Buy a good quality sprayer, a quart of Permethrin, and learn to use it. If your trees are too high to spray, or crowded in the centers, prune them down and open them up to sunshine. If you still have a few undamaged fruits on your trees, spraying or bagging are pretty much your only options.

Don Yellman, Great Falls, VA

Don,

Thanks for all the help.

>Remove all damaged peaches from the trees and send them out in the trash.

Right.

>Orchard cleanup, especially of fallen fruit, is a very important part of orchard maintenance.

I've been thinking of buying a 'cultivator' attachment for my string trimmer. I suspect that tool might be good for taking out the grass under the tree and making 'clean up' possible. I can't think of any other way to keep the area 'clean'.

>Buy a good quality sprayer...

I got a SP2 sprayer a few weeks ago for my grape vines, but still haven't sat down and figured out how to use, nor figured out where I'll store all these chemicals I'll need.