Is this fire blights?

Thats too bad :frowning:

According to this it can happen.

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The above article and others mention the fire blight bacterium identified as Erwinia amylovora in plums. There is not much mention of fire blight in plums so I hope it is a rare occurrence.

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@jaypeedee

That is because the disease is said to attack members of the rosacea and rubus family which technically includes stone fruits List of plants in the family Rosaceae | Britannica

https://treefruit.wsu.edu/crop-protection/disease-management/fire-blight/

All that said the likelihood of stone fruit being hit by fireblight is very rare. It is much more likely to be called fireblight but be a disease stone fruits normally get and not fireblight. Stone fruits on my farm can be passed over 1000x never getting fireblight when the disrase is present https://www.rhs.org.uk/disease/fireblight

This article is ecellent

This is a fantastic article
Fire Blight.

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@jaypeedee

Though technically true there might be 1 variety of plum in a state that might get fireblight it would be more likely to find a needle in a hay stack than for anyone of my hundreds of plums to get fireblight. There are different strains of fireblight some are resistant to streptomyacin or they are more aggressive. Right now a fb strain is hitting Kansas and Missouri like none we have seen before. It has not hit 1 of my hundreds of stone fruits. This strain is aggressively spreading through my pears and apples. The most resistant types like arkansas black apple was killed to the ground in a day. Green jade pear was killed to the ground in a day. Never saw an aggresive fireblight like it. Has not touched a peach, cherry, plum or apricot. Had one apricot many years ago died of an illness i was never able to identify which at the time i wondered. Later i learned of a more likely disease that killed that apricot.

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When all the leaves are wilted like that it means the trunk suddenly stopped supplying nutrients to the branch. So any problem is in the trunk or roots. My guess is there was something wrong in the bark junction there, I donā€™t see anything particular in the pictures though.

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Agree. Iā€™m saving this for future reference. Thanks for posting.

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Just wanted to add something that I learned recently, which is useful info I think related to (mis)identification of fire blight.

I havenā€™t had many problems with fire blight, but after an especially wet winter one of my apple trees starting showing similar signs. At first I thought it was fire blight but then I realized it is more likely nectria twig blight. Symptoms look somewhat similar, but I learned a key difference is in how it spreads:

Compared to nectria twig blight, which begins at the base of plant and is a pale wilted blight resulting from restricted water and nutrition, fire blight infections occur at the growing shoot tip and cause a black spreading necrosis along the length of the shoot as the causal bacteria advances down the shoot and into the central leader. (source)

In my case it was obviously spreading in the patterns more closely matching the nectria description, and the leaf tips were the last part to turn brown and wilt. I didnā€™t think to take a picture when it was at this stage, and by now it looks very difficult to distinguish from fire blight (to my eye at least). In any case, Iā€™m hoping it is indeed nectria because itā€™s less aggressive (though not treatable with fungicides).

Iā€™ve had some strikes that looked like that but I treated them like fireblight. One started squarely in the middle of a major limb but the end tip was not brown. It was a difficult decision because taking it out well below the strike meant sacrificing a bunch of fruit towards the tip that looked fine on a long fairly substantial limb. I did it anyway, leaving just a long ugly stub where the limb/scaffold met the trunk.

I started more conservatively but saw a bit of dark unhealthy wood all the way down to my final cut. My point, I guess, is Iā€™m not sure I would treat it any differently. I thought about it for about 24 hours then acted. Thatā€™s about as long as I like to wait. Interested in what others have to say.

I have a spot I saw today that Iā€™m watching. Iā€™ll try and take a picture and see what you think.