What's going on with my pear?

Does anyone know whats causing this?

2 Likes

Any thoughts? This might not be the best picture. I can take more. The leaves are dying. They look like the ones under the green pairs in the middle of the picture. It’s rapidly getting worse… The one 20ft away looks much better.

Is this a newly planted tree? Have you gotten enough rain this year?

I think this is it’s third year. Yeah we’ve been getting quite a bit. They just broke dormancy a few weeks ago. All my newly planted trees aren’t showing any stress.

Did you spray any herbicide recently?
Is this the only tree that looks like this?

No herbicide. All I’ve done is some light fertilizer of 19-19-19. The other one has full sized leaves and is starting to grow. I do notice a few leaves have some black necrosis on the leaf tips though.

What is a variety?

Is there a big difference of the leaves this year to last year’s. You said this is its 3rd year in ground, right?

It’s a Bartlett, I’m not sure what the rootstock is. Yeah that’s when I planted it. I bought it in a pot from the nursery so it’s older than that. Last year it seemed to leaf out and grow fine. The leaves should be close to full size. The other one has full size leaves already… I notice the bark is cracking too. I’m not sure if that’s normal when the tree gets bigger? I’ve never grown pear before.

Saw this. Was it similar to your situation?

Similar, I don’t have heavy soil though. I wonder if I over fertilized. I ran out of mulch when I got to that tree, the others had that as a buffer for some of the fert… The leaves come out, curl, and die.

Generally, people don’t fertilize apples or pears much esp. in fire blight-prone areas. Pushing growth in the spring when it can be wet (as the weather gets warmer) is a risk to get your trees infected with fire blight. It often strikes flowers and young shoots (rapidly growing by fertilizer).

Your tree did not look like being pushed by fertilizer, though. How is the tree now?

Thats good to know. My soil is really poor and I wasn’t getting much growth at all that’s the main reason i put it on.

It looks about the same now. I just looked this morning and it looks like there’s still some buds that want to come out.