Creek I think your pests took the bus to Maryland. I'm up to my ears in bugs, squirrels and deer. The stink bugs are not worse than the record year two years ago but they are up to their usual badness. The June beetles are horrible this year, and usually they are not on my radar since they caused so little damage. I have trapped dozens of squirrels and more keep showing up.

Scott

A squirrel stripped my few remaining plums the PCs missed, for the liquid, I think. It left the pits. Birds, too, attacking the fruit like never before.

One peach robbing squirrel was detained today. Still a black one out there I need to get. Its just a bad year. I'm ready for winter.

I'm going to be interested to see what happens NEXT year with PC, apple maggot, and coddling moth. There seems to be literally NOTHING for them to live on this year, no apples, no ornamental crabs, no plums, peaches, no flowering pear fruits. Mountain ash did set a crop this year, so perhaps some of them can live on those, I don't know.

And the birds were really going for green blueberries until I covered them. I think they are desperate for food, between the drought which drove worms deep underground and the lack of all kinds of fruiting shrubs that they would normally find, such as Tartarian honeysuckle which also froze off the normal red June berries, or the blackcaps which shriveled to nothingness from drought.

Squirrels a'plenty here, though, they obviously are finding something to eat -- because it's the 'burbs and so many people have bird feeders I think the squirrels are as fat as ever.

Up here in NW ontario its been weird. Very unusual winter (warm with just below average precip), and a warm, very wet spring (we had almsot 5 months of rain in end of april - middle of june), then hot and dry. I cant remember the last time we had this long of a streach at 30+C up here. Ive been recording that temp for the last 3 weeks in my yard.

There were trpple the amount of birds this spring, and here a month early at least. Squirrels were out all winter. We had one of the largest butterfly migrations in recent history this year, that means caterpillars, and LOTS of them. Some ive never seen before, like a massive amounts of luna moth. They destroyed my jostaberry (which recovered).

Spidermites overwintered, which ive never seen before. Big amount of slugs here too. There were a bunch of bugs ive never seen before on my apple. Small and black, and they distorted new growth. Simple dish soap spray stopped that.

Im not loosing much, which is a good thing. The other bonus, inr egards to bugs, is that the bee population exploded this year. Honeybee and native. THe same with my preditory wasp population.

One other thing ive had to deal with due to the massive spring rains is some sort of rust on my pear. Dark blotches are covering the some leaves. Doesnt seem to be affecting the new growth. There is a massive powdery mildew outbreak here as well, especially on the careganna.

Den-

I'm still finding curculio larvae in plums... They just went nuts this year with this goofy wx.

So, looks like no one else is seeing a silver lining in all this heat and dryness.I tweaked a few things this year as I do every year, but wouldn't expect that to cause such dramatic changes in pest pressure.Part of it may be that the fruit is ripening so much earlier and harvested before the stinkbugs peak in numbers. I'm also wondering whether synergy exists between some pesticides and the hot dry weather that have made them a lot more effective this year.

I see quite a few bright spots. The Japanese beetles seem to have petered out early.

And the vegetable garden, that I water while letting other stuff go, has done well ever since the early spring.