Despite attempts to remove the fire blight from this tree, the infection has spread.
An organic fruit orchard is a tough thing to have in North Carolina (or anywhere in the Southeast) because of two things: humidity and insects.
The humidity allows bacteria and fungus of all kinds to thrive and the abundance of insects make it easy for the microscopic bugs to hitch a ride onto your fruit trees with their macroscopic cousins.
When selecting trees to plant in our organic orchard, I kept in mind how difficult it would be to grow organic fruit here, and chose to plant mostly disease-resistant trees. I also chose to plant a few trees that had only moderate disease resistance, and a couple that were susceptible to common fruit tree diseases.
I thought that disease resistance alone would allow me to grow blight, scab and rust-free fruit (fire blight, apple scab and cedar apple rust are some of the more common diseases of fruit trees that we have to contend with), and that a moderate organic spray program would allow me to grow the less disease-resistant trees successfully.
Boy, was I wrong! Fewer than five years after planting, most of my least disease-resistant trees have either perished or been put out of their misery. I think that with a more aggressive spray program (i.e. one that uses very frequent applications of strong fungicides like copper), some of those wimpier trees would have survived.
However, my goal is to grow fruit that is both safe to eat and safe for the grower! So, I don’t use copper, antibiotics or some of the other organically-approved disease control methods available to me, because I don’t feel that they are safe for the environment or for me. My resistance to doing so has contributed to the death of several of my fruit trees, mostly Asian pears that were susceptible to fire blight.
Losing a tree to fire blight can be heart-wrenching, especially if the tree has grown to be big, strong and loaded with fruit, and you have already spent hours upon hours attempting to check the progress of the disease in that tree.
Here’s the moral of this story: plant only highly disease-resistant varieties of fruit trees in your organic orchard!
