Subject: [NAFEX] How to deal with severe fire blight
Date: Wed, 05 Mar 2003 08:27:14 -0500
After the infamous late freeze last spring (2002), I got hit pretty
badly by fire blight in my apple and pear trees. It seems like every
other pear tree branch was infected, and one of the apple trees
(Jonathan, I believe) was almost as badly hit. I whacked away large
amounts of the pear trees, but gave up on the Jonathan--too much to go
around trying to snip out little bits of branches here and there.
The question is: what do I do now.
* Do I chop them back to a 4-foot post and let the trees regrow? (I saw
something like that in Pomona recently.)
* A variation on this is: do I chop the tree back and then graft fire
blight resistant scions (cleft grafting at this time of year?)
* Do I just let the trees try to recover? (I think that I've run across
references to that too.)
* Other suggestions?
In zone 5b and saying really nasty things about unfairly late frosts.
-- sb
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Stefan Brandle, Ph.D., Taylor University CSS Department
sbrandle@css.tayloru.edu, Telephone: 765-998-4685 FAX: 765-998-4940 http://www.css.tayloru.edu/~sbrandle
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[NAFEX] How to deal with severe fire blight,
Stefan Brandle, 03/05/2003