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.
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
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.
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).
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.
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
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
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?