I love most fruit, but there is something about a tree ripened peach that just makes my day! It’s late winter/early spring in the northeast so why are we talking about peaches? The reason is management.
In the orchard yearly management is key, what you do or don’t do now can have a positive or negative impact on your trees for seasons to come. Forgetting about your winter maintenance can turn correctable problems into widespread issues over the summer. That’s where Brown Rot comes in.
What is Brown Rot?
A soft juicy peach while delicious can be challenging for the backyard orchardist. Throw in hot humid conditions that the northeast typically experiences during the growing season and it can be a breeding ground for fungal diseases.
Chief among peach fungal issues in the northeast is the Brown Rot. Brown Rot is a fungal disease that affects trees in the stone fruit family. (Stone fruits are peaches, plum, cherry, apricots, and nectarines. Typically identified as a stone fruit by their pit or stone in the center of the fruit.).
A bad case of brown rot can be disastrous.
Infected fruit will show up as soft brown spots. Then whole sides of your fruit can quickly become covered in fungal patches and spores. Infected fruit can rot on the tree, spores multiply with every rain event and can soon cover much a the trees fruit. Unaffected peaches may or may not ripen. Tree branches can become cankered and mummified fruit infected with the fungus can hang on trees until physically removed. Often remaining on the tree all winter long. Cankered limbs and mummified fruit, if left on the tree, can reinfect the tree and surrounding trees all over again come springtime.
How to Deal with Brown Rot?
Dealing with brown rot should be done with a multifaceted approach. First, remove infected fruit and wood. If you have mummified fruit on your tree remove them. In winter they are very easy to spot. Pick them off and dispose of them, get them off site, bury or compost (hot) them. If you see any drops try to pick them up and dispose them the same way.Remove cankered branches and dispose of infected wood. I will typically keep a contractor bag with me to dispose of infected wood and fruit while dealing with brown rot. It never hurts to clean your pruners with alcohol wipes at the same time.
Next step is dormant pruning. Prune heavily for air flow and sunlight. The more air and sun reaching into the tree the faster the tree dries after rain events. Fungus like brown rot thrives and multiples in moist conditions. Pruning for maximum airflow and light will have great returns.
Finally, you can use fungal sprays to help knock back your brown rot problem. Copper and sulfur are commonly used sprays when combatting aggressive brown rot issues. I only use these sprays on my trees as a last resort. My preferred spray time for copper and sulfur is before flower bloom. Using a copper spray isn’t a cure all for poor brown rot management practices. It is more like a reset.
After I use these sprays I make sure to keep up on management practices throughout the year. The idea is to not have to use sprays like copper again. I also use a combination of holistic sprays that I have borrowed from Michael Phillips. These sprays are a great management practice of using microbes to give your trees a competitive fungal environment to battle disease like brown rot in their own. More on that in another article.
Following these steps will minimize the effects of brown rot. Doing so will give your trees every opportunity to produce delicious tree ripened peaches this year and for years down the road. The below brown rot cycle is courtesy of NYS Agricultural Experiment Station.
We love questions, have a problem with your peach tree? Let us know, maybe we will answer it in our next article. And if you want more articles like this subscribe to our email list.