It’s a great time in the orchard, provided you don’t have apple scab. Orchards without scab can lengthen the time between sprays to 2 – 3 weeks. The next time you should need an insecticide is mid to late July for apple maggot fly.

The only exception to needing an insecticide is if your apple leaves have high numbers of leafminers or if your fruit had San Jose scale last year. As far as leafminer, I’ve still only found one orchard with high numbers of leafminers and it is still too early to spray to control the second generation. Regarding San Jose scale, this scale insect causes ¼ inch diameter red spots on the fruit which are difficult to miss. You know if you had a San Jose scale infestation problem. If you did have San Jose scale last year, now is a good time to spray an insecticide against the crawler. The insect growth regulator Esteem works well against San Jose scale crawlers. Assail and Provado are also effective; and Imidan would control many crawlers as well.

I did see some green apple aphids today, but I also found aphid predators. Come to the twilight meeting Thursday evening and I’ll bring apple leaves with aphids and aphid predators to show you.

If you do have scab in your orchard, I recommend spraying a full rate of Captan or Captec now and repeat this 7 days later. This will help to burn out scab and protect the fruit from scab. These frequent showers are making it very difficult to contain apple scab.

Mites seem to be under control. Several orchards were sprayed soon after petal fall, and now the mite situation looks good. The threshold through the month of June is 1 mite/leaf.

Our last twilight meeting of the year is Thursday, June 19 at 5:30 at Sweet Berry Farm at 19 Third Beach Road in Middletown. If you need directions call me or Kristen at 874-2967.

Next message will be recorded on Wednesday, June 25th.