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Fruit & Orchards

Cut every branch off my Hosui Asian pear

15 years ago

It was hit bad with what I think was fireblight. I would cut an infected branch off only to have the blackened leaves pop up on another branch. Eventually I was down to two branches and even these started to get infected so I cut the whole trunk off a few inches above the graft and now only have a stump sticking out of the ground. If it somehow survives and sprouts some new branches I will treat it with copper sulphate and streptomyacin this winter. The strange thing is my 20th Century and Shinseki didn't have any fireblight this year, although all three Asian pears had a mild case last year, and they are all with 30 feet of each other.

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Comments (2)

jellyman
15 years ago
Californian:

I doubt that copper sulfate will have much effect on fireblight, especially when applied in the dormant season. Streptomycin should be sprayed on early in spring, using fresh strep powder, about when the blossoms begin to open and again maybe a week to ten days later. Applying streptomycin in winter when the bacteria are inactive would be a waste of material and your time.

The tree you have been trying to save is most likely a goner, and I would take it out. With the others, prevention is the answer, since there is no real cure once fireblight gets going in the growing season.

Don Yellman, Great Falls, VA
lucky_p
15 years ago
Cal,
The university extension folks here in KY cautioned against Hosui, as it was a fireblight magnet in their trials, but I grafted one anyway.
No fireblight on anything this year, and Hosui is bearing its first crop this year - but I went out across the orchard to check on how its crop was coming along this afternoon, to find that its central leader had snapped off about 5 ft above ground level due to its fruit load. Waah!
The fruits are mostly ripe, so they're not a total loss, but I'll have to retrain a branch from just below the break to be a new leader.
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I just love asian pears. I find then irresistible and better eating than tart Apples. Pears branches grow straight up and tend form narrow tall trees. What I do is select shoots that will become branches, to form a wide balanced tree. Rub off branch shoot growing inwards to the tree center. Rubbing off forming branches is better than pruning them off later. I put a clothes pin just above a new shot to direct the branch to grow outwards. You can train a central leader, then clip the leader 8' high to open center and have a modified central leader. You can also start with a 36" trunk and train open center using clothes pins to open the scaffolds. The next few years as the tree takes shape rub off inward growing buds and allow outside growing buds. Tie down branches in winter to widen the scaffold branches.
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It may be fireblight in the branches so it is strangling off the branch, but since it isn't in the growing points, you don't see the classic symptoms. I had fireblight this way with an apple for many years before I was able to identify what it was, and the infected areas were never black, just a bit darker in color so it never fit the descriptions of fireblight.
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I had a similar problem about 8-10 years ago, a large deer herd eating everything. Worst damage was in the late summer-early fall, when the bucks would use my young fruit trees to polish their antlers and rub off the itchy "velvet." They killed a few, and maimed some others that did survive. I had to do as you suggest, putting fences made of six foor wire mesh around each tree -- about 50 trees total. Since then, our deer herd in the neighborhood has declined a lot. The neighbor two doors down had the misfortune of hitting 3 deer with her car with a one year period -- her insurance agent couldn't believe it. I almost hit them a couple of times. Enough of them got killed on the roads that the population has dropped significantly. I have a fawn living in my yard right now -- quite small when I saw it about 5 weeks ago for the first time. I likes to spend the days in my corn and under my blackberry bushes, and, of course, it is stripping things at night, like collards, kale, soybeans, etc. I'm cutting things down as soon as they are havested, like the sweet corn, to remove cover and hopefully make "Bambi" move on to greener pastures.
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Hmmm... I am going to have to modify my statement that they won't ripen off the tree and re-express it as "I don't know if they will ripen off the tree". I went back to the Wisconsin Extension information I read years ago when I was looking to purchase my trees because I had thought it said they wouldn't ripen off the tree. In rereading it i see they don't say that. They say essentially the same as ATTRA does in that they do ripen all the way on the tree unlike European pears. Nothing I have seen yet (haven't looked real hard) explicitly says they won't ripen any further off the tree. So, I don't know.
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