After several shoot blight strikes in my orchard I am starting to notice cankers on some of the trunks of my apples, some of which had no other signs of fire blight. Is there any other cause? I had some trees with pretty bad shot hole borer this year. Can the spread it? Also I’m walking around looking at trees now and there are a lot oozing from old pruning cuts and wounds. The liquid is clear. Is that safe or possibly fire blight? I’m about ready to start ripping out anything oozing. Most trees are around 5 years old in central Pennsylvania.
Hey, Bucky, welcome to the forum.
I’m not one to answer your fire blight questions, but there are other very knowledgeable people here who can. I do have a relevant question for you, though. How much rain have you had recently? Are you in one of those areas that’s been inundated? I’m asking that because too much water at once can cause trees to ooze clear sap. I surmise that enough might even cause some bark splitting from excessive hydration.
Yeah forgot to put that in. It rained all but a handful of days in June. I think we were 4 inches or so over normal. The soil is pretty wet.
Some of my trees just look bad. Bark is rotting on them and peeling. This is a cameo I past the blame off on shot hole borer earlier in the year but now I’m starting to wonder.
Like I said, I’m far from a prime source for help regarding fire blight. But under the circumstances of very wet conditions, I personally would not panic over the oozing that you described. It’s one of trees’ ways of relieving some of the stress caused by over hydration.
Of course, other more experienced members might contradict me. If so, give their comments a lot more weight than mine.
Here’s a crimson crisp that seems to be a weak grower this year. Leaves aren’t quite as green as they should be
I’ve seen oozing on peach and nectarines but not apples absent fire blight. So if apples are oozing it might well be fb. But then again I’m not certain by any means. I’ve never had fb in west TX but a friend near here appears to have been hammered this yr. It has been much wetter and more humid than usual this spring. But still not like points east of here.
Bucky,
I don’t think that’s fb, but I hope you’re pruning out the fb strikes, because that’s where it usually
starts. Once the weather dries out and becomes more normal, if those areas start to ooze a funny
looking sap and the bark turns black, then you’ve got fb.
I’ve been pruning it regularly. I know the brown ooze of fire blight. I just have quite a few trunks that look bad and want to be cautious. I hope is all from the shot hole borer. I started spraying the trunks good so most should recover if it’s that. I did just pull out this golden nugget didn’t take long for the cut to bronze over.
The black bark isn’t fb. It’s not uniform like that. It would be cankers that would ooze sap at times but not always.
Interesting. I have no idea what’s going on there and would really like to know. I don’t think it’s FB because one would expect the small twigs to certainly be infected. I see no signs of FB either on the foliage or the bark of those small twigs. I would expect to see discoloration of the bark tissue on those twigs not to mention foliage browning if it was FB.
Is it possible that the clear oozing is simply sap exiting pruning cuts induced by all the rain we’ve had? We’ve had unprecedented rain here for June/July and since your fairly close to me maybe you’ve had the same?
The black coloration of the trunk looks like simple wood mold to me, and the bark splitting appears to be sun/wind (SW injury) damage. I’d bet that’s not FB.
Just tossing darts here, I really have no idea.
Apples and pears don’t ooze from pruning cuts into healthy wood. Not that I’ve ever seen.
I agree Steve. I don’t like the look of that cross section pic. That’s not shot hole borer
damage. It looks more like crown rot, which could be due to the excessive rain and
poor drainage. I lost a Fuji to crown rot and that pic looks very similar to my tree.
I think you may be right on the crown rot on that one at least. I pulled it out of the ground without cutting any roots. I think it’s 5 years old. The roots did not look very good on it. I removed 4 trees today and others had similar looking cross sections but I could see small tunnels and the roots were healthy looking.
When you say you “pulled it out”. you mean with a tool or something right? Surely you don’t mean by hand?
What about it fruitnut…does crown rot cause apples or pears to ooze from healthy wood? Maybe you don’t get truly excessive rain there in TX to cause such a thing?
No crown rot in my location. And I don’t know if that’s fb, crown rot, or something else.