Drought stress

I have several pear trees that are showing significant drought stress. These trees are planted in an orchard about 1/2 mile from my house, so stringing hose isn’t an option. I had been subscribing to the let them tough it out school of thought, but today I couldn’t take it and went down with several 5 gallon buckets with holes drilled in the bottoms. I gave each tree around 40 gallons of water through those buckets and will give them another dose later tonight.

Should I have just let these trees go dormant instead? My fear was they wouldn’t go dormant, but rather die.

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How old are your trees?

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I use those big totes that they use for fertilizer and mount a couple of them on a trailer. It makes it easier to water trees away from my house. I have several and they are really handy. I use one for a sprayer and mounted an electrical pump on it

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I think you should water them. I would not want them stressed going into winter.

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We always strive for deep roots which means we let them go without once they are adults until we see leaves shriveling. My pears got 7 inches moisture for the year so far and will be ok. They cannot take less moisture than that as far as I know. Watering is great if you do it deep and in large quantities.

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One is 3rd leaf and one is 4th. However, both were around 10’ trees in 15 gallon pots when I planted them.

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That would work quite well. I’m fortunate that these trees are easily accessible via my pickup truck. I loaded up a bunch of buckets and a 40 gallon plastic garbage can in the bed of the truck, filled them up from the house and drove down to the orchard. Then I poured the water into two sets of 5 gallon buckets (with holes drilled through) per tree a few times. I did that two times and will hit them one more time tonight. I’ll probably continue to give them at least 10-15 gallons a day until we get a good soaking rain (fingers crossed).

Predictions are for a chance for rain tomorrow. Let’s hope. Even the weeds are dying now.

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Those are still babies as far as pears are concerned and you were wise to take care of them extra good. Your being a good orchardist looking out for your trees in that case because their roots are still to shallow to survive easily on their own.

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A line of storms is coming through right now, but they all appear to be tracking north of my location. That has happened frequently this summer.

edit…rain, beautiful rain :grin:

I’m afraid these trees are going to die. They do not look good today. Most all of the leaves are yellow or brown and are dropping to the ground. I fear they will be totally defoliated. If the watering and rain “bring them back” from their root reserves, I fear they won’t be able to make it through winter. I suppose time will tell

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Just following up on this thread. Both of these pear trees ended up pretty much defoliated back in mid August. When I scratch the cambium, they are still green so I am hopeful they’ll survive.

My question is, should I significantly reduce the above ground portion of these trees when I’m doing my winter pruning this year?

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