Hello my fruit growing friends.
I have some very old apricot trees and during pruning this year, many of them had darkened inner bark on big branches and the scaffold limbs. Since we have had insane fog all the way until August the past two years, I had both peach leaf curl and brown rot. Can those get into the bark? Here are my questions, please:
other than pruning, any cure?
Can you identify it?
If the scion wood looks healthy, would you use it for grafting? One apricot is very old and rare and I am trying to save the genetics and make as many baby trees as I can.
THANK YOU!!!
That is some form of heart rot. I have occasionally seen that on my trees but not very often. Supposedly brown rot can get in like that, you could have had a bad infestation several years ago which got into the bark and then the tree grew around it. The outer part looks pretty healthy though so it doesn’t look too bad overall. But, I am no expert on it. @Alan has pruned zillions of trees so maybe he has more insights. The scions should be fine I would say.
Nope, I have very little experience with issues right near the ocean and Z9 is another world from me. I don’t even know what heart rot is but the only coloration I obsess on is that of the cambium. If it’s nice and green I’m good. The stains appear to be inside the important part of the wood and probably aren’t a threat. Things that kill branches usually start from the outside and kill the cambium. .
On the above apricot given the past history of brown rot I would guess that is the most likely pathogen. It looks like it is pretty well contained so it may be OK.
When my Redbud trees suffered V. Wilt, they show classic signs of leaves wilting one or two branches at a time. It took a few years before the trees succumbed to diseases. When I cut branches and trunks, it showed dark streaks, but not quite like the one in your pic.
Thank you! I also believe it is brown rot or peach leaf curl. That Apricot tree is almost 50 years old and the limbs are mostly hollow. It has lived more than twice as long as an apricot should. The other two apricots are over 15 years old. So, I thought it was just aging. However, this year when I saw it in the 2 year old Spice Zee, I thought that I better find out! I will be spraying with lime sulfur those year, a lot. We usually have fog in the mornings from May until about June. This past two years, we had it from March until August. Then, we got skyrocketing temps! Very hard on the trees!
My first fruit tree was an apricot that came with a property in Topanga Canyon CA my father bought and we moved into in 1963. It was very small until our grey water pipe sprang a leak conveniently within its rootzone. The tree was still thriving when my father died around 2015 after providing many seasons of crops he enjoyed whenever the squirrels left him some. There were no signs of senescence at all. I have seen plenty of very old apricot trees, even in the high desert of New Mexico. They can live very long in the right environments.
Whoa! I wish our tree could live that long! The trunk is hollow and literally, half of it fell off during last years rains. I think that the rot has been in that trunk for many years. Might have even had it before I bought the property. In the past 6 years, every year, a new scaffold limb died.
Could be but could also be the way you water! Some of my plums this year began to defoliate during the middle of the heat spell in July. The more I watered the worse they got until a number completely defoliated. I thought it might be fungal so I treated them with liquid copper at evening dusk but that only seemed to make defoliation occur faster. If you are watering too close to the trunk during this dry spell, in lieu of assuring that the tree’s drip line is receiving adequate moisture, this can occur. Once I recognized my error in watering and focused more on deep watering the drip line perimeter, my defoliated limbs began to recover with new foliage. So now that I discovered how significant watering pattern can be I am focused on improving the thickness of my mulch out to the drip line and on newly planted immature trees out to the future drip line. Given the prediction of our western drought continuing for a period of years through 2030, I think paying more attention to how a tree is mulched becomes very important.
Dennis
Kent, wa
This past 2 weeks I’ve gotten around 5 inches of rain so I’ve only watered myself maybe once.
It’s just a few of the tips so I’m not too worried.
As far as future watering goes it’s a bit complicated. This tree is planted in a 3 foot landscape ring but the surrounding area is either crushed limestone or gravel. The area holds a bit of water until it soaks in during heavy rain. I do have loe pressure small sprinklers in the ring, so that is definitely now inside of the drip line.
When the tree was planted, the landscape ring probably was ok, and it appears to have been mulched to the ring, but the tree has outgrown the ring and the mulch as well. I would removed the ring and use wood chips or some other form of mulch all way out to the future drip line where your primary feeder roots are the main provider of water and nutrition. There’s a reason why experts advise to fertilize the drip line, the same reason one should mulch there as well.
Dennis
Kent, wa
