My very strange pears

If you have a conversation about your trees with the landowner, I don’t think it would be unreasonable to ask to see the label of the product they intend to spray. Many labels define a required buffer between the area getting the spray and the adjacent land. Use of an Ag chemical in a way that violates the label is a big deal.

Cityman,

I think you’ve handled this situation well overall, given your circumstances. It is so sad all you went through w/ your trees. Certainly there are much worse things individual humans experience, but for most folks on this forum, fruit growing is a passion/dream. It’s quite easy for me/probably most forum members, to empathize in your disappointments, through no fault of your own.

I think your signs are one of the best ideas yet. Even custom applicators would pay special attention to signs drawing attention to your backyard orchard. This is a very good idea, IMO.

You should know this ongoing thread has been extremely positive in understanding the individual dynamics of this situation. For that I am grateful for your sharing!

Also know, nothing posted on the internet is private. It’s possible (perhaps even likely) all you have written has been read by the mayor and his brother.

You are obviously a very bright younger individual (compared to me). Careful you don’t let youth be exploited.

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More great points from all, which I will take to heart. And I’ve been mindful of the fact that the offending sprayers could find this site and read my comments, and while I’ve been pretty critical and harsh in some of my statements- especially about their personalities and how they’ve handled the situation, I’ve been nothing but honest and really wouldn’t care too much if they do find and read the whole thread. While I know they’d be angry about some things I’ve said, the fact is its all true and I wouldn’t much care what they think about it. Also, I’ve been much more critical of the brother than the Mayor himself…not because I’m trying to protect myself from retaliation, but because he honestly has been much more reasonable and easier to deal with and even less liable in some ways. The brother is notoriously a difficult person, its a well known fact in the community, and they wouldn’t be surprised that I’ve had similar opinions and experiences in dealing with him.
But don’t misunderstand me, I very much appreciate the comments and the warning. I really do. Thanks again for all the support from everyone here. This has been the one place I’ve been able to vent my frustrations to people who actually get what a big deal this is. Everyone else just thinks “well, you got the money, so go to Lowes and buy some new trees and plant them and you’ll be back where you started last spring”!!! Nice having folks who know it isn’t that simple. I hope I haven’t abused this empathetic audience with my overly-long, unnecessarily detailed posts! (see…I am doing it now!). Thanks.

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I suspected the same. For my part, I don’t think your posts have been overly-long and unnecessarily detailed. I’ve never read of anything quite like this (normally growers accidentally kill their own trees by sloppy herbicide applications) much less someone sharing from such an intimate point of view.

If there are any non-patented trees, available to me, which I can personally graft for you (free) send me a PM. Peach is what I have mostly available. I have some extras budded last fall, which I could grow out for you this summer. They may not be exactly the varieties you are looking for, but would make decent peaches in TN, I think.

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As always, your generosity is much appreciated, as were your insightful comments/warnings and I remain a big fan of yours. I think I’ve ordered enough trees to replace my dead ones, but its nice to know you’re willing to help if I do need more. I’m replacing some trees with romance/bush cherries, and while I know they won’t be as big, I’m looking forward to seeing how they do in my orchard. I should say to everyone that as bad as this has been, there have been a few positives if you look for them. A few trees were terrible choices made when I knew less than I do know (yes, there really was a time like that!) so this gave me a chance to replace some of them. I’m not suggesting everyone go out and kill all their trees so they can update their varieties, but I’m willing to bet that if most of you lost a bunch of trees you would replace some of them with different things. SO it has been an opportunity to make some improvements. Also, several of the dead trees were placed in holes that were backfilled entirely with high-nitrogen, super fertile, amended soil. Knowing what I know now about how that is likely to result in all the roots just circling around inside the amended hole (someone here once posted a great photo of a tree they dug up from such a hole and all the roots had stayed and circled and bound up in the amended hole), it is also good that I’m getting the chance to correct that mistake as well. I never would have had the heart to just dig up those trees and try to fix them. So…just trying to find some bright spots. I also appreciate Olpea saying- and at least 3 others agreeing- that I haven’t bored people to death with what I said was (too) long-winded and overly detailed posts. Hopefully those details have helped humanize and describe this situation in ways that really provided the readers with insight on what it has really been like to have a trusted neighbor act carelessly and kill many of your trees. I don’t have enough expertise to offer anyone advice about growing trees, but hopefully by detailing this spray-drift drama from an intimate point of view has (or will) help other folks know what its like to go thru a situation like this and perhaps how to handle it a little better.

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So…just wanted to show you all one of the things I’m doing to try and minimize the chances of this happening to me again. Here is a photo of one of the signs I’m going to post along my property lines. I bought 10 of these, which will be enough to put them about every 200 feet, so they will be highly visable by anyone spraying property that joins me. Some of you may think I’m being overly polite after all that has happened, but I felt that putting big “DO NOT SPRAY” or similar signs would be less effective than these- but that’s just me. Sort of the catching flies with honey rather than vinegar thing. It is really hard for me to imagine someone- even a professional spray company operator- seeing these signs and not being at least a tiny bit more careful. Then again, people are strange so you never know. But these signs aren’t offensive or demanding, so maybe their courteously worded “request” will at least cause the next sprayer to wait for the wind to die down or put his boom a little closer to the ground. I don’t know. Anyone think these may help?

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Looks like your desk should be safe. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

Sorry, a serious thread , I just thought it could use some humer.

The sign looks nice!

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Yea…just imagine if our exterminator were to come through today. He’d think I went to a lot of trouble just for him! ha

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Great sign. My 2 cents: Put why on the sign. Maybe “Organic Grower” or “Fruit Trees on Site”.

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Thanks. Great idea, but signs are all made already. Also, one of the big challenges with signs is the fact that there is a constant trade-off between the size of the letters and the amount of information you can fit on the sign. These signs are a very standard size, and if you change the sign size the price goes up dramatically (even these are $20 each, btw!) and then you also have to buy specialty ground frames for them, which are also much higher. SO I had to use this size sign and wanted to keep letters as large as possible.

But I do like your idea. Also, one thing you probably don’t know is that part of what you are suggesting is self evident. I mean, most of my orchard goes right up to the property line, so most all of my fruit trees and within a few feet of these signs and are highly visible from where spraying would be done. So there isn’t much need to explain that they need to be careful because of the presence of fruit trees- they can see that there is an orchard 5 feet behind the signs.

Of course, that makes the carelessness of the guy who killed my trees all the more egregious, and is part of what frustrated me most. He had to know it was windy and he almost certainly could see the fog and mist comming out of his tractor boom sprayer floating the 10 feet over to my trees, but apparently just kept on spraying. Oh well…that’s all settled now so I won’t keep beating a dead horse (tree?) here.

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I would probably have had signs saying “Sprayers! No Drift Tolerated- Thank You”. But then, I live in NY where being direct is embedded in the culture.

You need to know there will be no herbicide applications when the wind or breeze is blowing your way- that is the specific caution you are looking for- right?

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You are right Alan, the heart of what I’m trying to convey is that they should not spray herbicides when the wind is blowing, and perhaps I should have been more specific and demanding it. For goodness sake, though, you would think that common sense and common decency would prevent someone from spraying a plant/tree killing spray in the wind 10 feet from a young orchard!!! But as you all know by now that at least one person did that very thing this past spring on my property line. Whether my little sign will prevent someone else from doing it or not remains to be seen; time will tell. Fingers crossed (and neighbors WARNED!) Prayers accepted. :slight_smile:

Well a bit of a crappy end to the saga but you take what you can get. As an employee of this guy I view this clearly as a case of a situation where you do not want to win the battle but lose the war. It is just not worth putting your job/quality of work life at risk over $1200, $1800 or even $5000. You came to the best accommodation you could. In the future, I think the main 2 lessons from this is 1) don’t give someone the chance to cover up, get your evidence first, and 2) only communicate with 1 key person, all your discussions have been with the Mayor so when you saw the brother you should have said, ‘‘Thanks but I will hold off and go over this with the Mayor as that is who I have been dealing with from the start’’.

Not to start a flame war but this is a great example of why as a society we need government and regulations. There are always those who will ignore science. There are always those who will poison the water, soil, air to make a quick buck. There are always those who will exploit anyone and anything they can to their advantage. The testing and report writing of labs and specialists, site visits to your place plus all surrounding farms, ect would have cost you easily over $10k if you had to do it on your own.

I would consider planting a grass or something KNOWN to be very sensitive to 2,4 D right at your property line. Let them / the spraying company know you have done so. Ask to be informed by the farm at spraying time. Take photos/video of your property line prior to spraying and then very couple days following the spray. If they don’t want to tell you when they spray just get in the habit of taking photo/video once per week. Overspray will be extremely evident.

Good luck. I hope it never happens again to you and that your stuff that got hit last year but did not die will have a full recovery.

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Well this is nothing compared to what Dupont did to some folks in West Virginia when disposing of chemicals used in the production of teflon. The NY Times did a really chilling piece on the subject.

It is always a difficult balancing act when it comes to Gov regulation- it also needs to be regulated. Common sense can be a rare commodity in all manner of human enterprise- private or public.

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You’re doing the right thing. Love the sign. They know what you mean.

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I also had problems with spray drift from someone spraying a cornfield next to my young trees last summer. I was standing in the orchard and saw the sprayer pass and felt the spray on my face from quite a distance away (beyond most of the fruit trees). The trees became pale and stunted, but did not die. Things are still dormant here, so I don’t know how they did over winter. The grass and weeds in the area did not die, so I do not know what kind of spray it was. I was unable to find out who farms the land, which is listed in the name of a woman who is not in the phone book, so I just kept an eye on things to see if the trees would survive. I have also thought of the sign idea, although I didn’t think about a professional one like you have. That looks impressive. Where did you go to have such nice signs made up? Thanks.

The signs were very easy and fairly inexpensive. They were just $15 each and I got them at a local sign shop…the same kind of place that makes those election signs you see in everyone’s yard at election time. Just google sign shop and your town and I’m sure you’ll find them. I already had one of my neighbors who farms property that joins me (not the one who killed me trees) tell me he saw my signs. I was afraid he might have not liked it but he was really nice about it and said it was a good idea because even though he knew what happened last year and was going to be very careful, sometimes his farm workers do the spraying and they may not know what happened and a little reminder to be careful might really help. I sort of apologized for the signs and said I hoped he understood, and the thing he really appreciated was how they were really polite “please” and “thank-you”. His exact words were “I don’t see how anyone could read those signs and get mad about them” which I liked.

As for your being sprayed, sounds like you either didn’t get hit with 2, 4-D or it was a much lighter dose. I had not only a lot of dead trees, but it killed weeds and other broadleaf plants for hundreds of yards onto my property. I had around 16 trees that died within a few weeks and a total of about 19 that I attribute to the spray. I had about 12 more that lived but were severely affected- to the point that they grew in strange, spirals all year, which makes me wonder if they will be deformed or otherwise affected forever. I cut off must of that spiral growth over the winter, which means those 12 trees basically lost a full year’s grown on every single limb.

The good news, if there is any, is that I don’t think you will have a lot to worry about from what you described. In addition to the dead and severely affected trees I just described, I had probably 25 more that were affected like you described…the leaves wilted, they stopped growing (for a while), became discolored, etc. However, those trees ended up putting out regular growth and this year they are waking up and looking normal. SO hopefully you came out ok! Good luck.

I like the signs, but I’m not sure skunks can read :sunglasses:

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I’ve had a few people e-mail questions about how my trees are this year, since my whole orchard was hit pretty hard by my neighbor’s 2, 4-D herbicide spray drift last year. I’ve previously stated that I had around 19 trees total that were killed by the spray, and about 12-15 more that were hit pretty hard but not killed, and the blooms and or fruit were destroyed on most all of my remaining 60 or so trees so I got almost no fruit last year.

If there is any good news in all of this, its that most all of my trees that didn’t die seem to have come back in what seems to be full health. There is one glaring exception- my european pear trees. I only have 4 of them, and to be fair they were about the hardest hit trees that didn’t actually die. But they are clearly still screwed up. They are still, as the title of this thread states, very strange. The growth they put on last year grew in kind of a spiral shape and was thin. Also, all the fruit spurs are very strange. They sort of sealed themselves up…they callusead over in sort of a smooth, completely-covered-themselves-in wood kind of way. They didn’t produce blooms anywhere on the tree, and the spurs haven’t produced anything alive yet at all. I’ll try to get some photos since I’m not describing it well.

So, a few lessons learned. Cherries are the most susceptible and almost all died- even though they were further from the drift than several other trees. Pears were second most susceptible. Some died, others survived but were deformed and may be ruined for life. Asian pears were clearly more resistant than euros, which was interesting. Apples and peaches were the toughest and most resistant. Some peach trees were extremely close to the drift cloud’s source and yet showed no signs other than dropping all their blooms. Plums were sort of in the middle on the scale of resistance. I lost 1 and several showed a lot of distress, but others just lost blooms and did ok. Apricots were hard hit. You’d think they’d be similar to peaches or plums, but they mostly died . Strangely, 3 apricots had their tops die but the rootstocks lived. These were 2-3 year old trees, not recently grafted ones, so that seemed odd to me. Paw paws showed no signs at all, though mine weren’t old enough to be blooming anyway.

Well, I thought I’d add this information to this thread for the sake of posterity. At least I can hope that maybe my nightmare will have served some small purpose if someone can learn something from the experience. So I wanted to document all I could about the effect on my trees- not only the year it happened (last year) but also the following year (this year). Maybe there is some scientific value in what I observed after my drift tragedy!.

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wow…what an ordeal…I know how I felt losing one tree, can’t imagine 19…Kudos to you for seeing this whole thing through…

I did have a question about 24D…Within the last couple of weeks I used it on my lawn to treat dollar weed that was in close proximity to my fruit trees. after reading this, I’ll never do that again. Curious what concentration of the 24D is harmful, the amount I’m using is about a couple tablespoons per gallon of water in a hand sprayer…

How long did it take between the time the trees were sprayed and when you first noticed a problem?