Went out to check on everything last night and noticed all my Housi pear flower petals and small fruit were brown and looking bad.
The leaves all look fine but if I split a fruitlet it is brown inside. Not good I’m sure. I had sprayed copper right before they opened.
I wanted to confirm my diagnosis and see if anyone had a suggestion going forward.
Thanks
It looks like freeze damage. Mine look similar after the frost we had Friday night. Did you guys experience a freeze recently? They were in petal fall already for me before they froze.
You know I thought that at first. I think it got to 33 or 34 degrees here but what made me question freeze damage was the peaches and plums look to be okay. I guess cold damage would be best case going forward. I hope some of the Hosuis survived.
Do you think you lost a bunch of pears too?
Agree that it’s probably caused by cold injury.
If it was fire blight, it will rapidly spread and you will see damage on leaves and branches, too.
If all blossoms turned brown but leaves and branches are not affected, it is likely Blossom Blast. It tends to occur when spring is wet during bloom time.
@growjimgrow I probably lost most of them. The local weather station said the lowest was 29 degrees but we were below freezing for several hours. The amount of damage makes me think it could have been lower. Most of the pear fruitlets are green but look damaged, pawpaw buds that were open froze, all persimmon buds open were lost too. My peach tree looks pretty good surprisingly! Everything was definitely frozen solid when I went outside at 5am.
ugh. I’m sorry. It has been terrible weather here also.
My trees are still young so they can just work on growing and developing more fruiting buds for next year. I should still get a good crop of figs and berries this year. There definitely seems to have been a temperature gradient. Trees to the front of my house were less damaged than those in the backyard. Also, growth higher up had less damage in some spots with only inches apart from damaged vs undamaged growth.
Good to know, I only looked at the lower branches because it was night time when I was looking. This Hosui gave me over 100 great pears last year so hopefully there are still some undamaged blossoms.
Those pears look OK, it looks like only the petals were injured and they were already pollinated. My pears took a freeze this year and I didn’t lose any fruitlets from what I can tell.
The insides of all those little pears are brown, such as if I cut them in half with my fingernail. I thought that meant death. Hopefully not.
Oops I need to read more carefully, I missed that. They can be brown at the tops but if the middle is brown they are dead.
Same here, mine look just like yours the day after a prolonged 29-30 degree low. I look at them almost every day and they definitely didnt look like that the day before. Now several days later they are turning black and falling off the tree. Very disappointing! My asian pears did the worst, probably 75% loss, while my european faired a bit better, but were still hit hard. .
So I ended up getting 15 of these Hosui pears after thinking I had lost them all. They are big this year and taste great.
They look amazing. The frost certainly helped you thin the crop to achieve that size. Hopefully, you’ll have more next year with that same size.
Thanks.
I remember that feeling of walking out to the orchard one morning and seeing all the flowers black and brown. Heartbreaking, we all know. Maybe the tree needed a break anyway after making all those pears last year.
