I have seven apple trees all about two or three years old.
Three have been relatively bug and disease free.
Pink Lady
Liberty
Enterprise
But these three have had more issues, for example Rosey Aphid, and then now this browning and dying of the leaves and branches on
Gold Rush
Pristine
Macintosh
Can someone please tell me what is causing this browning dying of some leaves and branches??
I would definitely get a second opinion, but that looks like fire blight to me.
Looks like fireblight to me.
Thank you! That is a big help. I am doing some research on it now. Seems like the aphids gave extra entry to the blight, so I need to be more diligent about that next year.
Let me know if you have any advice on best treatments.
John in Kentucky
Remove affected branches immediately and burn or otherwise destroy. You will want to take out significantly more than the affected section. Clean pruners with alcohol between cuts of the same or different trees. Make sure the wood at the cut looks green and unaffected. Fireblight spreads quickly throughout the tree and into neighboring trees. If removal of the branches does not stop the infection, you will have to cut further. If fireblight moves into the trunk you may lose the tree.
I have found that a copper spray during dormancy or streptomycin during bloom prevents fireblight in most cases. Don’t prune during rain or when rain is expected. Consider rootstock with some resistance to fireblight in future purchases. It may help the spread.
Thank you for the good advice.
Yes, it only seems to be happening after a spring/summer rain, and on three of my varieties.
John in Kentucky
get the Spectracide Immunox out and spray hard. it works for me.
FB is bacterial, so they aren’t working against that, except, perhaps by killing vectors. FB is very unpredictable, although commercial growers often seek to control it by following guidelines based on weather and development of growth. They use antibiotics that target the bacteria and have to be applied on any day in spring conditions favor the disease… they quickly lose their efficacy. Copper spray before bloom my reduce the threat of blossom blight.
Controlling aphids probably won’t solve the problem, though. Bees are most notorious for spreading it when trees are in bloom, so you can’t stop that.
That said, here in S. NY I’ve been dealing with it in many orchards for decades and it never starts for me with the flowers and is always shoot blight (on trees without aphids or leafhoppers even). The good news is that it has never become a chronic problem at any site I manage, even when I didn’t cut out the cankers that had gone from shoots into big wood- the FB died out on its own and didn’t show the following season even though the client was unwilling to pay me to cut out all the cankers in his orchard (big orchard, big job, not one of my rich customers) but that was only one instance.
I cut out the diseased shoots when I find them, but it isn’t some big deal. It doesn’t tend to progress during the season, regardless. It doesn’t spread in hot summer conditions, it seems. I don’t visit all the orchards I manage on a regular basis so sometimes the diseased shoots sit for quite a while, and it has never mattered.
You live in a different area and FB may be a different beast there, but here it tends only to be an existential issue in apple orchards on rootstocks that aren’t resistant and are dwarfing.
In 30 years of managing thousands of trees I’ve only lost about 5 pear trees to FB and not a single apple. On any given infected shoot you can clearly see the advancement of FB. I only cut back to the next healthy shoot.
I never got back to you but thank you for these encouraging words!
John in Kentucky