2nd leaf apricots baby leaves suddenly wilted...ideas?

Noticed this yesterday evening. I planted these two trees last year about 3 meters apart, different varieties from different nurseries. They grew strong last season and were looking fine so far this spring. But yesterday the new leaves coming out on both looked unhappy, and perhaps even worse this morning.

Any thoughts on what the issue might be? Default plan is to wait and see what happens, but if someone could identify what the problem is maybe I could take action or at least try to avoid it when planting replacements if these ones don’t make it.

Thanks for any thoughts.

Possible freeze damage or a root issue. If you do the scratch test is the bark uniformily green or are there dark streaks?

Check this thread Wilting Apricot Branch

Apricots often succumb to cambium kill where they leaf out and look normal in early spring and then die because of lack of support from the roots due to a destroyed vascular system.

Not the news you want to hear, I know, but probably the case given that you are in my region. The extreme dip in Feb. may have caused this. Here it mostly just destroyed their flower buds.

2 years ago I lost an apricot (orangered) to monilia laxa, showing similar symptoms. You could do a probe-cut into an affected limb. If there are darkish traces/spots in the wood its a sign it might be the mentioned fungus. The only hope then is to cut far back into unaffected wood. That didn’t save my tree though.
Other than that it might be apoplexy of apricot (thats the term used in germany) with even less hope of recovery. That often is a complex of problems leading to a sudden death of apricots. Growers count with a yearly loss of up to 10% of apricot trees to this.
That would be my guesses in my climate. Apricots are problematic here

The other opinions might be right about a possible cambium kill. Thats no problem in my climate. Our winters typically aren’t that cold

Possibly twig bores, I have them bad on my plums this year.

In my area I’ve seen cots killed by cambium damage many times, many sites. Never saw one killed by anything else, although I came close to losing one to borers with a cot on peach roots. Damn west coast nurseries.

This afternoon i dug out a Twocot apricot …the scion was complete toast…it was brown mush all the way down to the graft…it tried leafing out but they all crusted up… The rootstock looked fine (guessing it was some sort of peach)… Have no idea…young tree…bad location (winter sun scald?)…

I think twig borere is not NE issue.

I don’t have an apricot tree but have five apricot grafts. Fruit bud were dead but leaf buds are fine. A dew small twigs were dead, though. Also several branches of my J plums were dead.

I agree with Alan that the really cold temp in early March after a several days of warm Feb could kill it. Or, you can always blame voles.

It could e root damage by either disease or animal.

Mine had no borers (I pulled the entire tree and examined)…the rootstock has green…seems healthy…the graft was maybe a few inches above the soil and the entire scion is brown mush under the bark (left)…the tree was planted last spring…grew fine last summer…

Here pine voles focus on apples. Never had them go after anything else.

I don’t know what kind of voles we have . My friend lost her Winblo peach, a apple and, several rose bushes to voles. I am more fortunate because of neighborhood cats roaming my yard.

Probably meadow voles…i have them all over here. They look a little like hamsters…much bigger then house mice.

Pine voles eat roots, meadow voles girdle trees at the soil line.

Here a girdled peach is usually the result of rabbits,although I’ve had nectarines partially girdled by meadow voles. However, I’ve noticed that wildlife behaves differently in different places.

Must be pine voles, then, as when my friend lifted each tree up, no roots left.

Thanks for the responses everyone. Yesterday when I got home from work I cut a chunk off the Tomcot. Nothing looks amiss to me on a cross section, or some fingernail scraped area, but I don’t exactly know what to look for.

Not had any problems with voles on anything else, so I guess that is possible but not likely. Drainage is not fantastic there but not terrible either; certainly no standing water, and they are planted in a slightly raised area. We have had plenty of rain this spring, and getting lot more today. There are two nanking cherries very close by in about the same soil at about the same level and they are doing ok.

I suppose I’ll wait and see what happens. If they die, maybe that will give me an opportunity to try some of those jujubes I’ve been reading up on here!

They look healthy to me, Holly, but then I just killed off my last apricot- and I do mean last, not latest!

Around here nanking cherry seem to be pretty tolerant of water- they happily grow next to irrigation canals and such, so they may not be your best indicator.

Overwatering can be very hard on stone fruit, and in your conditions I wouldn’t rule out the possibility. And it will make the leaves droop.

I had 2 tomcot trees die on me several years back…they both started leafing out…but the leaves never sized up…just stayed tiny…then the whole thing just died back…at that time i figured it was root related (both trees were removed)…they were on Lovell i think.

They are horrid creatures.

Update: dug these up last weekend. Both roots looked pretty good, no obvious signs of what killed these trees. The Citation (background in photo) was dead, but had grown a lot in two years from the looks of it. The Pumiselect (foreground) was still living and had put out less roots but longer and thicker ones. In both cases there were longer roots but I cut them with the shovel while digging up.

I replaced them with these trees from Raintree

These were bareroot, decent size, looked good when I planted them. The second one is Shanxi Li. Happy to be joining the Juju club - I hope I like them!