But, there are preventative measures you can take to protect your fruit crops. As a bonus, it helps protect pollinators, like our honey bees, who need these fruit trees for survival.
Read on to learn how to keep your apple and pear tree free of disease with a fire blight treatment spray and protect pollinators’ food sources.
What Is Fire Blight
We love it when aspects of our farm work together and overlap, like how our livestock guardian dogs check on our nanny goats when we are birthing goats on the farm. Or, how vermicomposting enriches the soil in our garden, allowing us to grow healthy vegetables for our family.
We also experience this relationship between our honey bees and our gardens and orchards.
Not only do we extract honey from our hives, place DIY bee watering stations around our garden, and capture bee swarms, we strive to promote the health of pollinators because we know they play an essential role on our farm and in the world.
Our bees help us by promoting the health of our orchards and gardens. But, if our orchards become unhealthy, the bees will even spread disease from tree to tree. And, if our trees die, our bees have less food.
It is a cycle that encourages us to keep our orchards healthy for the sake of the bees as well as for the sake of the harvest.
Fire blight is one such disease that pollinators can spread. Brown or black crumbled leaves, fruit, or blossoms points to fire blight. A bacteria causes fire blight that, if left untreated, will eventually kill the tree.
Fire blight thrives in warm, humid, or wet weather at the beginning of the growing season. And can even survive the winter in cankers on the trees. Pome fruit trees, like apples and pears, are highly susceptible to fire blight.
What’s the good news? Fire blight is easily prevented and treatable. Follow these tips to prevent your orchard from becoming susceptible to fire blight infection and keep your orchards and honey bees thriving.
What Are the Symptoms of Fire Blight
Fire blight of apple and pear trees can include blossom blight, and shoot blight and can continue into the tree’s trunk if not treated, which eventually leads to the tree’s death. Here are some symptoms that indicate your tree should be treated.
- Leaves – Black crumbled leaves indicate fire blight. You will also see the young shoots bend like a shepherd’s hook and may almost look burnt.
- Bark and Branches – You might also notice that the base of the branches, twigs, or blossoms look water soaked or waterlogged. The tips of the branches sometimes look rusted and crack or peel.
- Cankers and Damage – You may even see a bacterial ooze or a weeping liquid coming from a fire blight canker, graft union, or damaged parts of the trees.
How Is Fire Blight Spread
Since the bacteria that cause fire blight can lie dormant in the cankers of trees during winter, it can survive from season to season. Conditions for fire blight to thrive include warm, humid, wet spring weather with temperatures between 75°F and 85°F.
New Growth
The rapid new growth allows for the bacteria that cause fire blight to grow and reproduce, so you should limit nitrogen fertilization. Then, with heavy rain, hail, or strong winds, trees can become damaged, and bacteria can enter these damaged spots on the trees.
Pruning
Pruning can spread fire blight if you prune an infected tree and then prune another healthy tree; you can pass the bacteria to the healthy tree if the bacteria is present on the pruning shears.
Pro-Tip: Dip your pruning tools in a disinfectant solution between trimming each tree. This reduces the chance of your tools spreading bacteria to healthy trees.
Pollinators
Pollinators and other insects can also spread the bacteria from tree to tree. Even rains, winds, or splashing water can spread the bacteria from tree to tree. The bacteria can enter in a damaged place on the tree or through the blossoms.
How to Prevent Fire Blight
We live in an area where the weather often provides the perfect conditions for fire blight. Because of this, we spray our trees to build fire blight resistance.
We chose a type of spray that is safe for honey bees and other pollinators. We use Ferti-Lome Fire Blight Spray, which is a streptomycin sulfate, a bactericide, not a copper sulfate mixture. Bactericides kill the bacterium Erwinia Amylovora, which leads to fire blight.
If you notice signs of fire blight, prune out any twigs, leaves, or branches that carry the signs of fire blight. You want to catch it before it spreads to the tree’s main trunk.
Spray for fire blight in early spring when your tree is in full bloom period. This product is bee-friendly, but we still wait until the evening to spray the trees when the bees are inactive.
Before buying trees for your orchard, you can also do your research to purchase fire blight-resistant varieties of apples or pears.
Supplies Needed
- 1 Gallon Sprayer – Use a larger sprayer if you have several trees or large trees.
- Ferti-Lome – You can buy Ferti-Lome on Amazon.
- Measuring Spoons – You will need a teaspoon.
- Long-Sleeved Shirt and Long Pants – Cover any exposed skin. You may want to wear a hat, too.
- Eye Protection – Sunglasses work well to give a layer of protection.
- Respirator Mask – Any face covering helps to keep you from breathing the Ferti-Lome in as you spray the trees.
- Gloves – Black nitrile gloves work well.
How to Treat for Fire Blight Step by Step
- First, fill the sprayer with 1 gallon of water.
- Put on hand protection.
- Mix in 1.2 teaspoons of Ferti-Lome in the sprayer.
- Replace the cap tightly and give it a shake to mix in the Ferti-Lome well.
- Put on eye protection and a mask before spraying.
- Spray your fruit trees with a pretty good mist. Cover the whole tree – blooms, leaves, branches, trunk, everything. Saturate the tree completely.
- After spraying the tree, repeat two more times every three days.
We hope you take up the torch to protect honey bees by keeping your hives safe from bee predators, by keeping your gardens and orchards healthy, and by practicing healthy and natural farming practices.
On The Farm
Farm cats… can’t live with ’em, and can’t live without ’em! Here’s a throwback to Smeegle and Gracie when they were still kittens!
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