Brown Rot is a fungal disease that can erupt from nowhere and take out every pristine fruit in a couple weeks. It is the worst disease. Brown Rot will disappear from an orchard with routine control. The Fruit & Orchard message board consensus is to dormant spray 2X a year. First when the leaves have just fallen but not freezing, late November here on LI, second when the buds swell in the early spring. For dormant spray mixture I use Volck Dormant Oil and Chlorothalonil by Ortho sold in Home Depot. Most folks here are using Copper and Dormant oil. I believe copper build up can harm earthworms and that Chlorothalonil breaks down harmlessly. There is stronger copper called Kocide and there is Garden shop strength. These dormant spray mixtures sanitize the tree bark of insect eggs and disease so they are only used when leaves are fallen. On a warm winter day I prune all my stonefruits to 'open vase'. Open vase pruning allows air circulation and central light penetration to control insects and disease. In the growing season I use Captan fungicide with pesticide every 2 weeks. Diseased and dropped wormy fruit gets covered in the compost pile ASAP. Use the board search feature for detailed threads. Required reading 'Brown Rot' in your County extension database.

Along with dormant sprays you also need to do a disease spray before the bloom comes out and after the petals have fallen. If you are highly susceptible, I would keep doing a few more sprays every couple of weeks, and again not too long before harvest (the sweetening fruits seem to get more susceptible to an infection on the outside).

I have generally done well against brown rot but it beat me up real good this past year due the very wet spring we had here. I had done only the dormant plus before/after bloom sprays but next year I will expand that to several more sprays after petal fall plus some later in the summer. It is also important to clean up any mummies left on the trees in the winter, they will "blossom" with bad stuff in the spring. Cleaning up and mulching under the trees also helps.

Scott

Thank you for your help, looks like I need a good yearround spray program. I`ve had beautiful Fruit and then rot as they start to get ripe Good luck Bill

Bill:

Your first post carried the ATL tag, which may indicate you live in the Atlanta area. If so, brown rot is surely not the only enemy of your peaches. In the mid-Atlantic and mid-south regions, insect pests like plum curculio and the oriental fruit moth are constant problems for most of us.

Quite frequently, (but not always), brown rot develops at the entry point of one of these insects, since they leave a break in the skin which is the only protection the peach has against disease, absent a fungicide spray program. Peaches should be rigorously inspected at thinning time for evidence of insect visits, and if a large percentage have been hit, it may be time to either consider regular spraying with an effective insecticide like permethrin or Imidan, or bagging in nylon shoe store try-on footies.

I have used the footies with great success on peaches, although I did not use them this past season. Instead, I sprayed with permethrin about every 2 weeks, and later in the season sprayed once with a systemic peach fungicide called Orbit. Unfortunately, Orbit is not commonly sold on the consumer market, and I don't know where you could buy it. I special ordered mine from Southern States over ten years ago, and it was very expensive. However, I use only tiny amounts of this chemical, and literally measure it into my sprayer with an eye dropper. Use of Orbit seems to completely eliminate brown rot.

I had a very large and beautiful peach crop this past season, and will eventually post photos of it when my son provides me with a clear and repeatable method of posting. Darn kids.

Don Yellman, Great Falls, VA