Today, I had the opportunity to speak to the participants in the 2nd annual Texas Fruit Conference. I was given the topic of “Stone fruit disease management: homeowner versus commercial”. Majority of the participants in this meeting are commercial growers and hobbyists. My talk contrasted the differences between a commercial grower and a homeowner: the number of plants that deal with, the different level of management, the amount and type of inputs, and the stakes that are involved. Two common peach diseases that occur in Texas were used as the models to discuss the different approaches used by these two groups of growers. A commercial grower’s primary goal is to make fruit and subsequently profit. A home grower also wants fruit, but profit is usually not an issue. Rather it is more for the enjoyment.
With a lot of research concentrated on commercial productions, there are guides available to the commercial growers pointing them to available pesticide products. However, many of these products are not accessible or feasible to the home grower. Nonetheless, the information contained in commercial grower guide can be helpful to understand what products may have properties to help protect the plant.

Some of the resources that we mentioned at this talk:

The Southeastern Peach Management guide
www.ent.uga.edu/peach/peachguide.pdf

The Southeastern Peach Growers’ Handbook
http://www.ent.uga.edu/peach/peachhbk/toc.htm

Texas Peach Handbook
http://agrilifelearn.tamu.edu/product-p/sp-489.htm

Texas Plant Disease Handbook
http://plantdiseasehandbook.tamu.edu

Homeowner’s Guide to Pests of Peaches, Plums and Pecans
AgriLife Extension publication E-145. This publication needed to be updated and

hopefully will be done soon.

http://agrilifelearn.tamu.edu/product-p/e-145.htm

AgriLife Bookstore

There are a series of 10 factsheets for stone fruit disease (E-PLP-#)
Go to the http://agrilifelearn.tamu.edu
Do a search for “peach” or “EPLP”. This will bring up all the stone fruit disease factsheets.