Ruud Kleinpaste: The importance of timing

Last week we discussed the six-month hiatus between noticing troubles with stone fruit and the time of activating prevention.  

Peach leaf curl is a rather ugly fungal disease that commences 6 months from now – in spring the leaf curl starts to become obvious on the newly emerged leaves of your peach trees.  

Taphrina deformans is the name of the disease that targets peaches and nectarines. The infection begins in autumn when the leaves are falling to the ground – a double dose of copper (a few times, 3 or 4 weeks apart) will stop the fungi from settling on the dormant fruit trees.  

Follow up questions I got: Does the copper spray debilitate the peach and nectarine’s buds?   

No worries! The buds are going to a dormant phase  

Another great example of important timing is winning battles from the Lemon Tree Borer.  

These borers are mainly found from Nelson-Blenheim north – they don’t like it too cold.  

This rather cool, sizeable, long-horn beetle is a native of our country. It was well-established here thousands of years before Charlotte Kemp introduced oranges into Kerikeri in 1819.  

Originally lemon tree borers would tunnel into native trees – a wide range of species became host plants (Mahoe, Kowhai, Coprosma, Manuka, etc). 

Exotic trees are also targeted by lemon tree borer. I remember them getting into our olive trees and Wisteria in Auckland – Tamarillo, Elm, Chestnut, Gorse, Apple are just a few of the exotic hosts.  

The most important species targeted by this borer are the citrus varieties that are grown commercially and in the backyard, but apple, persimmon, almond, cherry, walnut, and grapes are just as much in danger of damage – these beetles are economic pests!  

A damaged branch or trunk is the ultimate spot to lay eggs in. Small nooks and crannies are where the female lemon tree borer would leave her eggs – especially in branches where the bark had been removed or in the pruning cuts.   

The small larvae emerge from these eggs and start chewing their way deeper and deeper into the wood. A year or two later these larvae will have grown to a serious size before changing into a pupa, ready to turn into an adult beetle.  

This is the importance of timing: adult beetles emerge in spring and are active till late summer. Avoid pruning from winter till early autumn. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:07):
You're listening to the Saturday Morning with Jack team podcast
from News Talks at.

Speaker 2 (00:11):
Be rude climb pass? Is he with us this morning?
Killed her?

Speaker 3 (00:16):
Good morning Jack. I'm not in the garden today. I'm
at coh Order Perk in Perpetoy Toy.

Speaker 4 (00:21):
What do you think about that?

Speaker 3 (00:22):
Oh?

Speaker 1 (00:22):
Very good?

Speaker 2 (00:23):
What are you doing there?

Speaker 3 (00:24):
Well? What do you get showing people and kids coming
for walks and doing all sorts of stuff. We're going
to just once in my life.

Speaker 2 (00:33):
I'm not hoping for this to happen, but we're going
to call you and we're going to say, rude climb
passes in the garden and you say you're going to say, no,
I'm gonna I'm in a large I'm in a multi
story concrete car park or something like that.

Speaker 3 (00:45):
I think that's happened once, remember, is it? Yeah?

Speaker 5 (00:48):
Was it?

Speaker 2 (00:50):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (00:50):
It wasn't.

Speaker 2 (00:51):
Kid anyway, been a bit of a wild week nationwide
with the weather. But it is this time of year,
of course, that we need to start getting organized for
a few bits and pieces in a few months time.
And you're just going to run us through some lest
things we should be prioritizing.

Speaker 5 (01:08):
Well, that's one of the things and we talked about
it yesterday last week, and that was the peach leaf curl,
and we talked about the fact that that becomes obvious
in spring, that's six months away, and now is the
time that you have to do something to get that
peach leaf curl.

Speaker 3 (01:22):
Under control or to act stop it from doing anything
nasty to your peaches at the moment. And we talked
about it last week, the double gloss of copper right
now when the leads are starting to fall off, because
what you're doing is you're actually getting rid of the
spores that are causing the trouble in springtime. And you
do it once and then three which day do you

(01:43):
do it the second time? In the way you go up?
Like a question I got after our talk last week
is does the copper spray debilitate the peaches and the nectarines?
But as well, and I say no, they're not. They
do because it's fine, It has no hassle. If you
spray copper on an established leaf of a pitch, you
have trouble because the leaf usually basically burns to not

(02:08):
because now just before they.

Speaker 2 (02:10):
Drop the lease, who cares going anyway?

Speaker 5 (02:16):
Right?

Speaker 3 (02:18):
And that's it.

Speaker 4 (02:19):
So here's another thing, and this is the thing that
especially in the North Island, people are really beeved off about,
and that is that the wonderful creature that is that
each your citrus or actually bores into your citrus. It's
called the lemon tree borer. It can do quite a
bit of demon.

Speaker 3 (02:38):
Steel in the trees, to be quite honest, as I said,
Nelson Glenn and North that type of stuff.

Speaker 5 (02:43):
But here comes to.

Speaker 3 (02:44):
Things a lot of people don't realize with the name
lemon tree borer that it is not an introduced species
of beetle of a long wrun people. It has been
near all its life. And I reckon that creature was eating,
you know, all sorts of native trees at this station,
boring into native trees, and still does. But I reckon

(03:04):
when when the cure was literally taken into a museum
by Charlotte Kemp Charlotte Kemp and Keedty Kelly in eighteen nineteen,
I reckon, all the lemonry boards were literally approauding on
the stone storm wall because they had finally something distent
to eat, and honestly they did. They got right into it.

(03:27):
This is the thing because they love to lay their
eggs on naked wood that has been prune, for instance.
You can do that in the spring and summertime when
the border are around. No, there are no borers at
the moment because it's in alltumn time. Now is the
time to literally prune your lemon trees, your sitterust tries

(03:51):
without that extra hassle. So this is the preventative thing.
Prunent now. That means that you don't have to do
it later on and get all these rubbish things going on.

Speaker 2 (04:03):
Very good, Thank you so much. Enjoy your time in Papatoi.

Speaker 3 (04:06):
I might certainly do that.

Speaker 2 (04:08):
Getch you shirt, yeah, catch you very soon. That is
ruge time pass. Not quite in the garden for us,
but the next best thing this morning.

Speaker 1 (04:15):
For more from Saturday Morning with Jack Tame, listen live
to News Talks ed B from nine am Saturday, or
follow the podcast on iHeartRadio.