Nope, March is way too late for us to spray for PLC. Fruitnut is closer to the mark. We refer to it as the "holiday" spraying for PLC: Thanksgiving (you'll still have leaves on your trees no doubt), Christmas and Valentine's Day. But this year, it was too late to do a February 14th spray since we had a bit of a warm up and generally mild winter, so I only got two sprayings in this year. But, we've had a much, much drier winter this year than the last 3 years, so I think we'll be okay. I just had one of our local orchard specialists over today, and he was in the same boat as me. So, don't feel so badly :-) Patty S.

Belle grows well in the north but your tree doesn't look like Belle. I have belle of Georgia and mine are round on botton and Belle peaches stay light yellow color while your peach already has red color. Your HD tree has probably been mislabeled. When does your peach ripen? Does it taste like a peach. What color flesh yellow or white. Thinning lets the peaches grow to a large size. Too many peaches break branches. Peaches on thin branches snap later. Too many fruit stresses the tree so it gets sick.

Laurie: Agree with Olpea that your peach tree is suffering from bacterial canker. No need for me to take an entire page to explain what it is; Google it yourself and read all about it. Bacterial canker is common on peach trees, and has nothing to do with borers. I dormant spray peaches with copper each season to try to prevent this disease from getting a foothold on my stone fruit trees. A tree with canker at that point on the trunk is a goner, since you can't really prune it off without destroying the tree. I can't get to your photos of the leaves, but if they are dead then so is the tree, regardless of your experience with some other tree that you do not specify. A spring freeze may temporarily cause damage to emerging leaves, but on a healthy tree they quickly recover. So that's not it either. Peach leaf curl is common in climates that have consistently cool, moist spring weather and a slow warmup, but curl must be a relatively rare occurrence in Colorado. Don Yellman, Great Falls, VA

Removing the infected leaves from the trees are TOTAL WASTE OF TIME. There are no significant difference if you remove them from the tree or not. I did not remove any infected leaves from the tree two winter seasons ago, and there was tremendous infection that year due to the constant rains. This year, out of several hundred thousand peach and nectarine leaves, I only spotted 5 of them that has the peach curl. And I did not spray! The simple reason is that it has been dry. But here's the thing that really helped out my tree when I had severe PLC infections last year. 1. Don't remove the leaves, TOTAL WASTE OF TIME, and it doesn't help the tree at all if you do it. Use your time to do other things instead like the ones that follow. 2. Come early summer when it is getting hot, and no more rains, apply loads of fertilizers, especially high in Nitrogen. And supplement with Epsom salts. Supply adequate irrigation. The idea here is to help your tree recover vigorously to replace the infected leaves which will fall off. The biggest mistake of homegrowers is not to fertilize their trees when they have PLC infections. The new vigorous leaves will not be infected in the drier months, and it will help your tree prepare much better for next year. 3. Let the infected leaves fall, but promptly remove all the leaves that fell down at most weekly, and cart them off into the streets for yard waste pick up by the city to be composted properly where those pathogens will surely die. 4. Around the fall season, always remove the fallen leaves before they decay. 5. Apply your first batch of PLC fungicide around thanksgiving. Spray also the fences and the soil and nearby trees where possible splashes from the rain could go into your trees. 6. Around Christmas day, be sure to remove all the leaves hanging on the trees if you still see some of them. remove also the mummified fruit trees. Then spray with the strongest fungicide that you have, like lime sulfur. 7. Around super bowl time after the holidays, when the buds are starting to swell, apply the last batch of PLC fungicide. 8. If you happen to have brown rot and twig blight, it might be good to spray diluted concentrations of copper on your blooms when it is rainy during the bloom time.