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[Spidra Webster <spidra@speakeasy.net>]

2 years ago, I saw that my neighbor's asian pear had fireblight. I worried that his tree would spread it to my own apple, pear and loquat trees. As nicely as I could, I let him know what he had, printed out UC IPM info on fireblight, let him know he'd need to prune it several inches below symptoms or he'd lose the tree. His first language is Mandarin and I couldn't find any fireblight info I could give him in his own language. He knows English but not well enough to ensure our communication would be free of language and cultural misunderstandings. He hired some fellow to prune the tree but he was a "yardener" rather than a gardener and left a number of affected branches uncut. The tree is still infected. And this year my trees finally caught it from his. We had late rains, creating the perfect weather for spreading things. His pear tree is old and large so he wouldn't have lost as much if he'd cut the fireblight all off. My pear tree is young and I've lost 7/8 of the set fruit I had because it got hit by fireblight.

If I had $, I'd offer to pay for an informed pruner to get after his infection but I don't. Having to go out to my tree every day and look for signs of fireblight and prune & spray has been more onerous than I'd like. How would you handle something like this? Would you focus entirely on doing a lot of work to make up for the neighbor not doing enough or talk to the neighbor again or just give up growing apples and pears that don't have an extraordinarily high degree of fireblight resistance?

Megan Lynch

Berkeley, CA

CRFG, NAFEX: I'm in USDA Zone 9b

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