During periods of high humidity(more important consideration than rain) it is always good to have an 'airy' environment and good morning sun.
That is a rule of thumb I consider for roses and tomatoes alike. :)

i had one peach this summer..

and that was because a warm blast in MARCH!!!! .. in MI.. made them bloom a month and a half early aprill

followed by repeated freezes in may.. that killed all the buds ... including most fruit in MI ...

i cant believe what apples are costing.. in MI ...

drought in fall or winter.. can have an impact on the general vigor of the tree ... but it has nothing to do with bud set in spring ...

i have no clue on your late summer humidity question.. other than to ask where you are??? MI summer humidity is not a problem..

i am a bit confused with your comment of peaches ripening in fall during your rainy season.. arent peaches supposed to ripen in mid to late august???

ken

ken of the frozen north. Peaches ripen from early July until early October. And they rot from early June until October. I shouldn't make fun of your climate. I was in SW MI, as you may remember, and the area was beautiful. Nice people too. And except for the area around Coloma, MI, the rest of the apples I found were from California and New Zealand!!! (Did not buy.) This was in Sept. and Oct. Did get some nice cheap raspberries near Bangor though. But the area around Kalamazoo was barren of fruit. Hundreds of acres of trees and nothing to show for it. The definition of disaster in my book.

Dennis, this area of PA is a big peach area. There are 2 times when rot is almost absent. When it never rains and we have a really bad drought, and when it rains every day. The every day rains wash the spores off the fruit, and the droughts do not favor fungus.

What you probably had was brown rot. Do some reading on it and you will likely go out and cut the peach tree down. What I do is get the peach just before it ripens, pick it, wash it with a very dilute bleach solution and then let it ripen inside. Alternatively (and what I usually do if truth be told) is to find one that either the birds have pecked on or has a tiny brown spot. These are almost ripe. I eat around the bird peck marks and enjoy. Once the tree matures and you have hundreds of peaches, you will likely get a dozen peaches suitable for eating most years. If you spray, your harvest will increase multi-fold, but for one tree I think you will find it a PITA.

"There are 2 times when rot is almost absent. When it never rains and we have a really bad drought, and when it rains every day. The every day rains wash the spores off the fruit, and the droughts do not favor fungus."
Dzit,

I've never observed a reduction in rot from every day rains. I've always noticed constant rain = more rot (even with sprays).

You may be thinking of powdery mildew. Rain does wash off those spores, but powdery mildew operates very differently from brown rot.

As long as the peaches don't have any visible injury or rot, you shouldn't have to wash them in bleach once they're inside to prevent rot. The disadvantage of bleach is that it's so strong, even a very small amount can impart a bleach flavor.

Olpea, Will bagged peach protect the fruits from rain water therefore reducing the powery mildew, and rot?

Biomed,

I don't have much experience with bagging. However, many folks on this forum have indicated bagging somewhat increases rot w/ stone fruits. Powdery mildew isn't much of a problem with peaches. I have some cherries that get a little mildew, but that's about it.

One spray, two weeks pre-harvest, would probably be enough to prevent rot in most locations. Some places don't need any spray for brown rot.

Olpea, no, I mean brown rot. About 4 years ago we had a June and July when it rained a little almost every single day. My buddy with the peach orchard couldn't spray and missed more than 1/2 his fungicide applications. The brown rot was less than normal, even the nectarines were problem free.

Rain doesn't seem to be a big factor for mildew around, we get it every year. It is not uncommon to have the Lilac leaves turn white from powdery mildew. There are so many mold spores here that sometimes patches of grass turn that sickly grey from constant warm and wet summers. The record for May is 24 days of rain, but 6 or 7 days in a row of rain is fairly common. June and July bring thunderstorms with lots of humidity and temps that don't dip below 75F for weeks.

If we don't get t-storms, the ground can dry pretty fast, but the atmosphere is moistened by the proximity of the ocean and Chesapeake Bay, so molds and mildew levels only dip a little.

So far as sprays for brown rot, we start at petal fall and continue until a week before harvest. The local orchards sell at the farmers markets in Baltimore and D.C. Fruit often is tree ripened, even the nectarines. As you can imagine, rots of all kinds are common knowledge. The average farmer can distinguish between downy mildew and powdery mildew. The powdery ones usually hit in the spring, so that helps ID.

So I do mean brown rot. I know fungal rot / mildew. Maybe you mistook my reference to every day rains to mean commonly seen rains, but I mean literally raining once in every 24 hour period for many days in a row.

One tablespoon of bleach in a gallon of water is not a strong solution. It is just a sanitizing solution. The spores of rot are endemic, and we have to assume they are on every peach. Maybe they haven't found a break in the skin yet, but they're out there and once you bring them into the house with its relatively still air and the handling of the peach, just about every peach will rot. Been doing this for 15 years or more, if I bother to pick peaches, I don't want to have them rot.

I'm going to second Olpea. Rain every day won't wash the brown rot off nectarines or any other stone fruit. That isn't going to happen, no way no how. The orchardist, in example given, missed half his sprays not all.

This post was edited by fruitnut on Sun, Dec 23, 12 at 21:46

Dzit,

Your orchard buddy has an interesting story and I can't explain why he noticed less rot the year he had constant rain. But I don't think the correlation he's drawn from that experience is an accurate one.

As Fruitnut alluded, I don't see any evidence continual rain reduces brown rot severity, rather the opposite. I regularly read several commercial newsletters (MSU CAT Alert, Purdue Fancy Fruit, Illinois Fruit & Vegetable News, Cornell Scaffolds, Rutgers Plant & Pest Advisory for fruit, Fruit Grower News). I've also read numerous peach production and spray guides and articles on brown rot. To my recollection, none of them have ever mentioned constant rain reduces brown rot infection. Whenever rain is mentioned, it's in the context of increasing brown rot occurrence. This mirrors my own experience. We too have long periods of rain here, with it not being unusual in some years to rain every day for a week or more. It's during those times I clearly see the most rot. Sometimes almost every peach close to harvest has some light skin rot, just enough to make them unsellable.

I don't know where you live in PA but Googled ave. monthly rainfall for Adams County PA (a lot of fruit grown there). On average we get more summer rain here (Johnson County KS) than Adams County, so I would think our brown rot pressure would be more intense. That said, it's fairly unusual to spray specifically for brown rot from petal fall to harvest, except under the most extreme conditions (no commercial growers do it here). The greatest risk for brown rot infection is during bloom (blossom blight) and pre-harvest. As long as there aren't OFM larva tunneling the fruit, for most people, one spray a couple weeks prior to harvest will all but eliminate brown rot on fruit. I do use a fungicide during cover sprays, but I do it for scab not rot. Unmanaged/unsprayed peach trees around here show little brown rot until pre-harvest. Because of that, I would recommend most backyard growers spray only once for brown rot at pre-harvest.

Lastly, I've never experienced peaches rotting on the counter unless they are damaged or already rotting when picked. To be sure there are storage rots in commercial (CA) storage, but the humidity in CA storage is about 90%, which is quite different than typical counter top storage. If you've had problems w/ peaches rotting inside and you can't taste the bleach, then of course I'm not suggesting you stop using it.

However for most people, I don't think it's necessary. If someone were to feel a need to sanitize their peaches, a commercial product called Tsunami 100 has been used by some in the industry. It's basically a weak mix of hydrogen peroxide. It not only destroys bacteria, but inhibits fungal rots as well.

I once used a very weak solution of bleach on some blackberries to see if they would store longer (blackberries are much more perishable than peaches) and I could still detect a bleach flavor, so...

My beaches get rotten and I lose most of it. The reason which I discovered is that rain and heat are fertile environment for fungus. Fungus attacks peaches like there is no tomorrow. Since I started Fungi spray schedule especially in humid and hot weather I saved most of my crop. Now I have to deal with another nuisance called the birds. I tried bagging it does deadly to fungus.

Has any research been done with every day rain? Probably not. For somebody to categorically state that fungus cannot be washed off fruit closes the mind to a possibility. If it is a physical thing, the spore, can anybody suggest why it is impervious to being physically moved by water?

Good supposition olpea, I am almost at the border of Adams County. Average rains mean nothing as you know. For instance, we received over 3 ft. of rain in Aug-Sep last year (2011) for a total of just over 72 inches for the year. This year was a drought for most of June and all of July, but we still recorded 5.6 inches of rain for July alone. Our 30 yr. average for the year is about 44 inches, but these last few years have been wet.
http://weather-warehouse.com/WeatherHistory/PastWeatherData_York3SswPumpStn_York_PA_July.html

On average, I don't believe Kansas (Johnson County) is wetter. Over the 3 main summer months (June, July, Aug) SCen PA is decidedly wetter, and I don't know how they record humidity (as you agree, equally important for fungal growth), but this area rivals Bangkok, Thailand for humidity.
http://www.ksre.ksu.edu/wdl/precip%20files/jo_p.asp

I won't labor this any more. We spray at petal fall, then start again from mid-late June. For a season that lasts from early July until early October, we spray just about every week all summer. This year we had peaches in June, but usually not until about the 4th of July.

So far as the bleach thing, I'm not doing enough fruit to make it worth my while to get something special. If rot is looking like it will rot everything, I probably don't bring a single fruit in. The sanitizing solution works well enough, and imparts no taste that I can tell. Rule of thumb with bleach: if you can smell it, you're probably using too much. Rather than killing the fungus, a lot of bleach can change the pH of the liquid and the spores are not killed.

Dzit,

Looks like the discussion is winding down, but I'm going to clarify a few points.

"For somebody to categorically state that fungus cannot be washed off fruit closes the mind to a possibility."

For the record I never stated fungus cannot be washed off fruit. My point in not agreeing with your conclusion is that it's very anecdotal. I sometimes except anecdotal evidence, but not when it contradicts duplicated research and my own experience.

Additionally, most fungi simply don't work that way (completely wash off the fruit during constant precipitation - Powdery mildew is an exception). That is one of the reasons why the old method of sprinkle irrigation has been replaced with drip irrigation in fruit orchards. With rot or scab, once the fruit is infected, there is no way to completely wash the spores off, rather with increasing wetness the infection spreads deeper into the fruit and the fungus (fruits) to produce conidia which washes and blows onto more fruits.

I'm open to your possibility, but find it highly improbable one farmer in PA has discovered some secret of which defies how fungi operate, contradicts my own experience, and is a phenonmena of which no other researcher is aware.

"Over the 3 main summer months (June, July, Aug) SCen PA is decidedly wetter"

This is simply not borne out in the statistics. You mention you live just outside Adams County. Harrisburg is close to Adams County, although it doesn't really matter where you live, the statistics for most parts of the state seem fairly consistent. Average summer rainfall for Harrisburg is: April 3.31"; May 4.6"; June 3.99; July 3.21"; August 3.24"; Sept 3.65"

See: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/online/ccd/nrmlprcp.html

For Stilwell KS (where I live) ave. summer precipitation is:
April 3.53"; May 5.02"; June 5.63"; July 3.99"; August 3.68"; Sept 5.05"

See: http://www.ksre.ksu.edu/wdl/precip%20files/jo_p.asp

You can see from the data, that Stilwell KS is wetter for every summer month than Harrisburg PA.

In terms of bleach, as I stated earlier, I'm not suggesting you change a thing if you are comfortable washing your peaches in a bleach solution. My comment was directed at others who might feel the need to sanitize their peaches base on your posts. I wasn't suggesting they purchase Tsunami 100, rather that a weak solution of hydrogen peroxide would be a preferable fruit wash to bleach. That said, I still maintain a sanitizing wash is not necessary in most cases. Your circumstances may be different, especially if you are deliberately seeking to harvest peaches that have bird pecks (i.e. damage).

I heard that the curl leaf is caused by too much rain.

What can you do do prevent this disease ECO-friendly?

Thanks.

Plant:

Keeping the rain and dew off your trees during leaf bud break will provide 100% control of peach leaf curl. In zone 10 bud break might start as early as now and infection might continue on late expanding leaf buds until the trees are somewhat leafed out. There has been limited success with just covering the trees with a heavy weight floating row cover. This keeps the water off some of the expanding buds. A cover of clear greenhouse poly would work better as long as the bottom is open and it doesn't get too hot under the cover.

If you covered the plant with floating row cover and put poly over that during Jan and Febr your leaf curl issues would be over. Having row cover under the poly should control over-heating as long as the bottom is open.

This post was edited by fruitnut on Tue, Dec 25, 12 at 13:29

Hi

Sorry for the delay. I forgot to say that peach was O.K. in summer.

Dzitmoidonc hi

I guess it might be brown rot, i though it might be just about rain. I don't want cut my peach tree, i have got long way to get peach tree in recent years so i would like to have some peaches. It didn't come to my mind it could be some disease. I guess i need to figure out what spray is for peaches. What you use for peaches? I remember word Captan. I think i need to figure out where to get chemicals. Can you say name of product or what chemical composition to use for brown rot? So i can find some how where to get one? Are some chmicals listed in this site used for brown rot that are good?

http://extension.psu.edu/fruit-production/news/2012/brown-rot-preharvest-alert