Fruit Tree Ailments
Home gardeners continue year after year to apply treatments, amend soils, prune, shape, tend and toil over a few trees trying to keep them producing.
I, Chris Hatch, the co-owner of this company am just such a gardener. After loosing two trees to leaf curl, and working tirelessly last spring to try to save a 3rd with topical treatments while battling Oak Worms, Scale Bugs and the like. I reached out to a Certified and Licensed Tree Care Specialist Oscar Rios. We quickly determined that the cost to treat my property was going to be many thousands of dollars if completed by this large scale company. We needed a better solution. So together we started our own company with treatments that work, and pricing designed to match the budget of home owners, HOA’s, and small communities.
When a farmer has a failing crop, he calls in the help of specialists to save his trees or risk the loss of the crop, or worse, the entire orchard. When your home orchard takes a similar hit, your greatest worry is that canning season may be a bust and your famous “home made” pies and jams are not going to be as “home made” as once advertised.
At Tree Health Solutions, we make the same knowledge base and treatments available to the large scale farmer, available to you at a fraction of the cost offered by high overhead large scale arborist companies.
Citrus Leafminers:
These tiny moth larvae eat new citrus leaves causing citrus leaves to become twisted and curled.
The larvae also nest in the edges of leaves by rolling the leaf around themselves. Miners are easily identifiable by the discolored trails seen on young trees or new leaves on your mature trees.
While these pests will not kill the tree in most cases, they can stunt the growth, or disfigure the tree which can effect the visual appeal and fruit yield.
Leafminers: I’m sure you are tired of spraying your trees year after year only to have these leaf and fruit eating worms return each spring. We have a better solution which won’t have you washing pesticides off your fruit.
Leaf Curl: A fungal infection with a very short window for topical treatments which rarely fully remove the infection. We offer a specialized combination of systemic treatments year round that help strengthen the tree and trigger the specific immune response within the tree to combat the fungus.
Leaf Curl:
Caused by the fungus Taphrina deformans and occurs wherever fruit trees (most commonly peaches), are grown.
The fungus causes the growing cells of new leaves to multiply quickly and randomly, which results in the puckered, curled, distorted appearance. The color of the leaves vary from shades of green and yellow, to pink, orange, and purple. Dusty spores are produced on the surface of the leaf as it matures. Fruit can be infected and will either drop prematurely or form distortions on the surface leaving the fruits skin weakened and prone to insect damage.
Why common treatments fail: The spores overwinter in bark crevices and around the buds. Primary infection occurs from bud swell until the first leaves fully emerge. Rains wash the spores into the buds and long periods of cool, wet weather are ideal for infection. When temperatures warm in early spring, bud swell and leaf development is rapid and topical treatment must occur immediately, and not be interfered with by additional rain. Considering how our spring progressed with cool, wet weather, then warmed suddenly (where most treatments should have been applied) and then fell back into cool, wet weather washing these treatments away. This was quickly followed in March by prolonged warming where the partially untreated leaves began to bud and emerge and the spores once again take flight further infecting this and the surrounding trees.
There was little anyone could do these last few years to combat this scourge, making this year far worse for local orchards than past decades with more predictable spring seasons. You can attempt to combat this problem with off the shelf treatments once leaf fall takes place next winter, and again on the last rain of the spring. However, we have a better solution, one which the rains can’t carry away.
Scale Insects: Somehow worse than Aphids in that there are few natural predators in our area to combat them and sprayed pesticides are only marginally effective as they only target the young mobile insect. Systemic Treatments are recommended for population control.
Twig Boring and Scale Insects:
Most Commonly effecting Apple and Plumb Trees, this specific breed of insect is bleeding your tree dry. While unlikely to kill the tree without years of exposure, the tree will suffer, and have weakened immune responses to disease, brittle branches which snap under fruit load, and reduced fruit yield in both number and size of fruit.
What you see in the picture here is a Scale insect which feeds on the sap of a twig, branch or leaf. Their life cycle begins when the Scales overwinter and then lay eggs between April and May. There are hundreds of eggs beneath the Scale’s body, and in late spring the eggs hatch and crawl away to new parts of the tree, clamp onto the bark of tree and begin to feed on the sap of the tree.
