North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

["Ed Fackler" <ed.fackler@gmail.com>]

Bill:

     You have the classic symptoms of Oriental Fruit Moth which lays eggs in the tips of new growth.  The egg hatches inside the shoot and tunnels downward.  My experience is that if your trees are protected with an insecticide (my choice was Imidan, and still is) through petal fall to late June/mid July, it will do the trick.

ed

On 6/25/07, William C. Garthright <billg@inebraska.com> wrote:

I planted some peach trees last year and didn't pay enough attention to
them over the summer. In the fall, I realized that something had been
killing the growing tips of all the branches. This caused them to get
very bushy, sprouting more and more shoots that also died at the ends.
The trees looked fine at a distance, but the problem was obvious when I
looked closer.

After looking around on the Internet, I figured it might be peach twig
borers (though I could never see any worms or insects in the ends). I
used dormant spray last winter, and tried Bt in the spring, but I've
still got the problem. It's also started to show up on a couple of
pluots I planted this spring, and a little bit on my sour cherry.

Since I'm in Nebraska, I called the Backyard Farmer public TV program,
but the person answering phones told me to just take a sample of the
problem to a local nursery. So I did that, and they told me it wasn't an
insect, but some kind of disease. They didn't know what kind of disease,
but suggested maybe peach leaf curl (peach trees aren't very common
here, to say nothing of pluots!).

Well, it doesn't look like any pictures of peach leaf curl I can find on
the Internet. Almost all of the leaves on my peach trees look just fine
(the pluots have some wildly-contorted leaves, though). There's no sign
of any problem on the peach trees except for the very tips of the
growing branches. The extreme tip - right at the very end - dies, and
there are a couple of small, brown leaves withered up there, but
everything else looks great. The branch then sprouts out all sorts of
places, often within an inch of where the end died. I've tried to
dissect the dead ends, and the pith is brown and sort of gummy and
grainy, but I can't see anything that looks alive. And it doesn't extend
down the branch. The dead part is only an inch long (though the outer
stem, which stays green, is somewhat swollen).

Does this sound familiar to anyone? I've been cutting off the dead ends
and tossing them in the garbage, but I keep getting more. With no real
idea of the problem, I've started spraying with Bonide Fruit Tree Spray
(Captan, Malathion, and Carbaryl). My local nursery told me that it
would be fine for all my fruit trees, not just the species listed on the
label. But I would much rather target the specific problem, if I could
figure out what it is.

Thanks much,

Bill
Lincoln, NE (zone 5)


--
Not only is life a bitch, it has puppies. - Adrienne E. Gusoff

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