North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

["Kieran or Donna" <redherring@tnaccess.com>]

 

 

Helene,

    We need to have a serious discussion about your cherry trees.  There is a really bad virus in Europe that can be carried in the pits of all stone fruits.  It's called Plumpox or Sharka, and It recently got loose in Pennsylvania. As a results hundreds, perhaps thousands of trees have been cut down, including wild trees like chokecherry, and nurserymen there have to go through through special inspections and quarentines.  If the Sharka outbreak there is not controlled, growing stones fruits in the eastern U.S. will become even more difficult than it already is.  It is illegal to bring pits of stonefruits into the U.S., and probably the same is true of Canada.  Making a mistake can be very costly for many many people.  You have a couple of choices.  You can do nothing and hope that you, and your neighbors, are lucky.  You might get in big trouble a few years down the road if you are wrong.  You can just admit it, and watch while a govt man pulls up your tree and takes it off to be burned.  Or you can attempt to take a middle road.  Sharka is carried on pruning tools, do not prune the tree and then use those tools on any other stone fruit.  I have not heard that the virus could spread via aphids or insects except when it blooms.  Once your tree blooms, bees will carry the pollen to other trees in the area, and that is how the disease spreads.  If you can quietly ask about the possibility of having the tree inspected, you might get away with it.  If you do, and it gets a clean bill of health, I might be interested in some seeds myself.  I never heard of a black sour cherry.   Donna TN z6

 

P.S.  How many of the rest of you caught this one?  I hear one of these stories every year or two, sometimes before the act, sometimes after.  If everyone in NAFEX was watching for this kind of thing, maybe we could keep diseases from spreading so badly.  Hey, would that be a good article for Pomona?  Quarantine areas, and the particular diseases behind them?  One of the oldest stories of this kind I have heard was that there was a local farm that had apple trees from France, they must have imported scions.  This probably happened in the 20's-40's, probably wasn't even a law against it then. 

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