Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Forbidden Fruit

Tonight I walked through the garden to do a check-up on all of the fruit tree's. It's important to check them regularly to become aware of any problems before they get too serious. With my citrus trees, scale can spread among them quite quickly, but can easily be taken care of if I catch it early on one tree (instead of waiting until it has spread to all ten). I have quite a few young trees that I've planted over the past year, and since every fruit care class I've ever taken has encouraged removing fruit for the first couple of years (to encourage a healthy root system on the tree), I removed all of my fruit about a month ago. Well, today while walking the grounds I saw a few pieces that I missed.

Someone once told me that every piece of fruit you pull off in the first year will give you three pieces of fruit the following year. I'm not sure if that is true, but I'm not chancing it. Which is why this Dorsett apple just got yanked off the branch and discarded.

The same happened to this Independence Nectarine.

And this Gold Dust Peach.

This practice doesn't just apply to fruit tree's though, it also applies to blueberries. So say so long to these Sharp Blue blueberries too, while you're at it.

As much as it's hard to pull off this fruit, I can't help but thinking how much better my fruit is going to taste in the long run, and how much healthier my trees will be.

Additional bad news tonight though- leaf curl. I have it on both of my peach trees, and I'm pretty sure I have it on my nectarine as well. This makes me sad. I shall now spend the rest of the evening searching the UC Davis IPM website to see what I can do about it. As far as I can tell there really is nothing I can do until the fall.
Posted by Carri Stokes

6 comments:

  1. carri-

    as for peach leaf curl - once you have a leaf that has it, nothing can be done at that point. to avoid peachleaf curl, you need to spray a copper based product 2-3 times starting in late fall and ending just before bud break. a little bit of curl like in your picture - probably wouldnt be noticed by the tree, but i have seen it so bad as to cause every leaf to drop, the second set of leaves were ok. this is my first year w/ a bit of the curl - i havent sprayed any of my trees in the two years since i started my orchard up here. i will probably do so now, as i dont want it to get out of control. you should pick up the leaves that fall from these trees and put them in the garbage - as a compost pile might not get hot enuff to kill off the curl pathogens on the leaf. also - curl has a good year with high late rains - just like we have this year. good luck.

    garry

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  2. And congratulations to Carri's "Between the Limes", voted "Best New Blog" in the Mouse & Trowel Awards! http://mouseandtrowel.org/

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  5. Carri,

    What Garry said about leaf curl on the peaches. There's precious little you can do about it now? And with the wet weather we've had this spring? Guess what? It wouldn't matter if you had sprayed the trees this winter. The dampness that we've suffered through all this month would have brought this on -- copper fungicide or no copper fungicide. How do I know? Because I have two peach trees that I sprayed three times during the dormant season. Both trees still have a touch of curl -- aided -- in part -- by this terrible spring weather.

    Oh yes -- and congratulations!

    Bill

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  6. Yea, good old leaf curl. It's about the only thing I spray every year, except for light oil. If ya want nectarines and peaches.... better just accept it.
    Hey those are some grart looking artichokes.

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