By Clint Thompson
Peach production may have ended months ago, but management for next season and beyond continues this time of year.
Jeff Cook, University of Georgia Cooperative Extension agriculture and natural resources (ANR) agent for Peach and Taylor counties, highlighted the management tactics that peach growers must be implementing.
“If they haven’t done a trunk spray for peach tree borers they should do that in areas where they know they have problems,” Cook said. “Young trees that don’t have the main disruption deployed in the orchard yet, they definitely want to put some sort of thing out there and at least be looking for damage.
“They can be putting on a lot of fall pre-emergent type of herbicides. We usually do a spring or fall (application). Keep that herbicide strip clean. That’s really about it.”
Water needs are a key component as well, especially before the consecutive weekends in early October that drenched the region.
“We were keeping them watered because they got so dry,” Cook said. “You’re not going to go in normal dormancy if everything physiologically shuts down. You want the tree to be progressing normally through the physiological process that happens as it goes dormant.
“You start looking at some of these other trees out there, instead of going from green to fall colors, they’re going from green to brown. A lot of these trees just shed leaves, lost leaves, it’s a shock to them. You need to do everything you can to make them keep growing normally.”