The effectiveness of biological and chemical fungicides in peach orchards in Crimea

The purpose of research was to evaluate the efficiency of different variants of application of certain biological and chemical fungicides for improving protective measures of the peach from the economically most important fungal diseases: Taphrina deformans (Berk.) Tul. – leaf curl; Thyrostroma carpophilum (Lev.) B. Sutton – shot-hole disease; Sphaerotheca pannosa (Wallr.) Lev. var. persicae Woronich – powdery mildew. The research was carried out in peach orchards located in Bakchisaray district of the Republic Crimea during three years (2014-2016). The most common cultivars here are ‘Favourita Morettini’. For combatting the phytocomplex of peach diseases, three variants of protective measures have been developed and approbated: 1^st variant – Biopreparats: environmentally safe biopreparats from industrial strains of bacteria species Bacillus subtilis, the strain IPM 215 (the biofungicide Baktofit, SK) and from fungi species Trichoderma viride Pers. (biofungicide “Trichodermin”, 0.5%); 2^nd variant – mixed type: consecutive treatment with biopreparats and chemical fungicides; 3^rd variant – chemical treatment: chemical protection under the standard Crimean scheme. The experiment included non-treated trees, which were used as reference. It has been noted that the use of biopreparats resulted in a 30% decrease of damages caused by fungal diseases, while in the case of using combined protection schema this result amounted to 39%, compared with the reference level. A particularly useful outcome of the combined protection scheme proved to be reduction of the number of chemical treatments from 7 to 4. The most efficient way of protecting from causal agents of fungal diseases is chemical protection, which made it possible to reduce the damaging to 66%, compared with the reference level.