What Should You Do If You See This On Your Fruit Trees?

well if you're seeing this on your peach or nectarine trees you're not alone this is one of the most common diseases to affect these trees this is peach leaf curl also known as to Farina de foremans and this affects nearly all peach and nectarine trees now I've been very fortunate that's far and I've had very little with this to deal with in my backyard garden but this year it's gotten especially bad and although I am still getting some fruit setting on this tree it's obvious that it's suffering you can see here there's a twig that also has died back because of this disease and here's another twig that's been affected so this disease not only affects the leaves but it also affects the flowers the buds of the tree and the twigs and the bark so the best way to deal with this disease is to actually be preventative with your treatment and you can easily do that organically using a product such as this this is a copper fungicide and all you got to do is in the fall when the trees lost all its foliage is you want to take some of that copper fungicide about two tablespoons for about a gallon and a half of water you want to fill up one of these pump sprayers like this and spray down the tree completely until it's actually dripping it's also recommended that you reapply that copper fungicide spray once again in the spring just before the new growth re-emerges as the rains and everything will knock off that first application and those spores can still be hanging out throughout the tree now before the leaves actually look called to form like this you'll notice these little red spots on the front and the back of the leaf that's the first indicator that you've got the disease and you want to try to remove these leaves as soon as you see them on the tree so last season I had noticed this florida king peach tree started to develop the disease and I removed a bunch of those leaves but I also knew that I wanted to treat this with that copper fungicide which I did and it didn't completely eliminate the problem it still came back so I did go around and manually pick off a lot of the leaves and also prune the tree quite heavily as that's going to help the tree to defend itself because that fungus likes to hang out and moist clustered up areas of the tree so here we are in the spring and you've got a serious issue like what I have here and it's all over your tree so what do you do at this point what I recommend on doing is manually going around and physically removing each and every one of these infected leaves that you see now this might take a little bit of time depending on how big your tree is now if your tree is much larger than this this is actually more variety that I've kept prune to keep it much lower but if you had a big tree and it was getting loaded down with fruits you're going to want to thin out those fruits and allow the tree more energy to focus on repairing and healing itself from this disease and as you can see at the base of the tree here it's already starting to lose some of those infected leaves and you want to make sure that you get all that up off the ground as well because that fungus will continue to proliferate right there in the soil at the base of the tree and you don't want that so pick up all the fallen leaves and also scrape back maybe the top layer of mulch and put a fresh layer there just another way you can get ahead of the game I just got me a bucket here I'm just going to go ahead and manually pluck off every infected leave that I see you know this really is a pain and so I wouldn't blame you if you just decided to say the heck with the tree and go with a more resilient varietal there's less prone to this kind of stuff but if you're like me and you're fond of peaches and nectarines you might just decide that it's worth the effort as you're just not going to find any better fruit than homegrown fruit now infected limbs like this here you're going to want to prune off and again get it out of the garden and when you're done pruning on the tree make sure you sanitize your pruners you don't want to spread this disease to your other trees so my new thing is I carry around some of these alcohol preps in my pocket with me when I'm out in the garden just makes quick work out of sanitizing your hand pruners just look at that that is rough okay so I've now finished removing all the infected leaves that I see on the tree and this is what I ended up taking off there's probably a few infected leaves still hiding out somewhere in the tree in fact I know there is I can see a couple but that's okay I got the upper hand now and that's what this was all about we're not going to be able to fully eliminate the disease this season but by getting the upper hand I'm stopping this disease from spreading to some of the nearby trees and also I'm stopping those leaves from dropping where they can dry up and then crumble into the soil before I get a chance to pick them up so now I'm just going to get down here under the tree and pick up all the leaves alright now I got all those fallen diseased leaves picked up from around the base of the tree now there's one more thing I'm going to do today and that's to help give this tree a boost by giving it some fertilizer now you could go ahead and fertilize with some organic store-bought fruit tree fertilizer but today I'm going to be fertilizing this tree with some chopped up comfrey leaves and also some stinging nettle liquid fertilizer I made up yesterday so I'm just going to chop down this country plant here this is a cut and come again perennial so this plant here will probably flush out four or five times this season if you weren't already aware the comfrey plant has a very deep taproot so it mines up minerals and nutrients that other plants can't get to makes a great fertilizer a great mulch for around your fruit trees you chop it up a little bit spread that out and I'm just going to leave it atop the soil like that next I'm going to feed that tree using some stinging nettle liquid fertilizer I made this by cutting off the tips of the plant filling up a blender putting some water in there and blending it up that's all there is to it I like to use about 2 to 4 tablespoons of this concentrate - 2 gallons of water and I'm just going to give this tree a really good drench and I'll be coming around in about another week or so and doing a full-year spray with some compost tea and that's going to help to give even more nutrients to this tree and also just give it some more energy to fight off this fungal disease so if you found this video helpful or entertaining in any way really do appreciate you rating commenting and of course your subscription always means a lot to me so thank you for tuning in today and so with that I hope this video finds you and finds you well out in the world and out in your garden planting more abundance in your life take care everybody I'll be talking to you again soon [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Plant Abundance

Views: 327,099

Rating: 4.9376636 out of 5

Keywords: Peach Leaf Curl, Disease, Taphrina deformans, Control, Organic Method, Fruit Tree, Garden, Managment

Id: _XH6lhu1wzY

Length: 6min 45sec (405 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 19 2017