Normal fertilizing during flowering won't hurt fruit set. You'd have to apply massive amounts, enough to burn the roots or leaves. If fertilizer hurt fruit set many would use it to thin the fruit. Foliar application of fish oil and other stuff including some fertilizers has been tried to reduce fruit set on peach. But it doesn't work very well and that's foliar in an attempt to burn the flowers.

I am having the exact problem that you are. I check these trees every couple of days and still nothing. I planted several trees in January and February. My mulberry, apple, 4 cherry trees, Santa Rosa plum and fig trees have all leafed out. However, my Red Baron peach, Sherwood Jujube, Choctaw pecan, Spice Zee nectaplum, multi-grafted pluot and my multi-grafted low chill pear tree are still dormant. Although, my pear tree did leaf out but after those high, dry winds that we had, they dried up and have not put forth new leaves. And, the same thing happened to my 2 apricot trees (that were planted last year). They leafed out and I lost the leaves to the wind. Everything is still green on the trunks except, I think that my Spice Zee is fading and the trunk is getting less green and pliable. I wish they would have gotten leaves before the 100 degree weather got here.

Labels for the photos of April 9: Photo 1 has 3 large shrubs, front to back: Fat Albert Blue Spruce, Coppertina ninebark, Shadbush of some type. Lower growing, back to front: Amsonia hubrichtii has the feathery leaves and very pale blue flowers; the bright pink flower on a low bush in front of the blue spruce is a rhododendron, I think Independence Day; The bright purple is a Salvia, but I don't remember the type, and the one sort of between the rhodie and the salvia is a Hellebore seedling. Photo 2 has two Rhododendron Olga Mezitt with a combination of green and bright red leaves, one on the far right in front of the dark green arborvitae Techny and one in front of the bright yellow spice bush. The yellow tinted arborvitae between the Rhodie Olga Mezitt is Sunkist. The red, yellow, green shrubby thin between the Sunkist arborvitae and the right side Rhodie is one of the same varieties in the first photos, Amsonia hubrichtii in all its fall glory. The blue-green low groundcover in front of the Sunkist arborvitae is Greystone dianthus AKA pinks (though it is white flowered) and the rambly out-of-control groundcover near the front left is Nepeta AKA catmint. There are a couple of the same Fat Albert blue spruces, one to the left of the yellow spicebush, and one just peaking out to the right of the Sunkist arborvitae. Here are some photos from earlier in the life of this bed when it was in its third growing season. I deliberately left lots of room for the shrubs to grow, so there is quite a bit of mulch showing. Since then I've also added a few plants here and there as I could shoehorn them in. From June 2010 This covers much of the same area as photo 2 above, and though the trellises shown here are still in the same place, they are not nearly as visible now as they were in 2010 when this photo was taken. The Techny and Sunkist arborvitae are smaller as are the Fat Albert blue spruce. The purple flowers are the Nepeta AKA catmint, and the white flowers are the Greystone dianthus AKA pinks. The feathery plant to the right and slightly behind Greystone is the Amsonia hubrichtii in its first season. To the right of that in front of the blue spruce and also in its first season is one of the Rhododendron Olga Mezitt. From June 2010 This is a close up including the blue spruce, Amsonia, and Coppertina ninebark (plus a tiny bit of the rhododendron's leaves at the bottom) from the first photo in my earlier post. And here is a photo looking down the bed to give an idea of how relatively sparse it was in its third season. From June 2010 I spent a bit more money than I often do on the evergreens to get reasonable sized plants, though I did buy them at the autumn sales in 2007, since I wanted medium-slow growing evergreens. Many of the rest of the plants have been added as quart pots, or in the case of the hydrangeas in this bed as, rooted cuttings in 4" pots. I knew that the hydrangeas, clematis and perennials would get larger faster than the evergreens so the smaller plants would catch up. Here's a photo (taken from a higher vantage point so things look a bit shorter than they are) of the whole bed from the end where photo 1 from April 9 was taken. This is one of the quietest times of year in this bed, after many of the spring and summer bloomers have stopped, but before the fall color erupts. There are still a couple of hydrangeas not very visible in this photo, some asters, colchicum bulbs blooming, and the white fluffy seedheads of clematis along with varied foliage texture and color.

Dorothy, I feel awful about your Montmorency cherry tree. It just breaks my heart to think that the ice storm got it. I keep hoping you'll post that you've noticed significant resprouting on the poor thing one of these days. We are getting rain and, as promised, I watched it rain, even stood out in the rain for a while, and would have enjoyed it even more if we hadn't been watching (on the news) and listening to (fire, police radios) the progress of the EF-4 tornado that hit Lone Grove. Then, as another potentially dangerous wave of severe weather approached our end of Love County about a half-hour after the tornado hit Lone Grove, we fled to the tornado shelter and sat there for about a half-hour while the rain and hail pounded us. When we came out of the tornado shelter, the yard was a lake with still-unmelted hail floating in huge puddles. We got 2" total on Mon. and Tues., and 3/4s of that fell on Tues. The rest fell on Saturday when we had a thundersleet storm. The rain is lovely, but we remain in a D2 (severe) drought. However, our Keetch-Byrum Drought Index, which predicts grassfire/wildfire intensity, dropped from just under 700 points (on a scale of 0-800) to just under 600 points which was a tremendous improvement. I was so relieved. I am not sure our KDBI has ever hit 700 and it was a milestone we didn't need to reach. Of course, fire danger remains very high as long as the grasses are dormant, and we still have had fires almost every day, but the FFs aren't having as much trouble stopping the fires now that the soil has a small amount of moisture in it and live fuel is not as likely to burn. Still, until significant spring green-up occurs, fire danger will be very high (or worse) on almost any day that rain doesn't fall. Eight inches! I think that here at our house we've had about 2.5" this year, but I am not complaining, because that's a lot more rain than we've had in quite some time. We are normally fairly dry in Jan. and Feb. anyway, so just 2" or 3" in those two months combined puts us at almost "normal" rainfall for the year-to-date. I hope I didn't jinx us by talking about being at almost "normal" rainfall for Jan./Feb.! It would be sad if we had to go weeks and weeks without significant rainfall again. Dawn