Nectarine Fruit Tree Disease

This is one of the 3-in-1 fruit tree (Peach+Nectarine+Plum), I think the nectarine is infected by bacterial spot. On the same tree, only the nectarine and peach have disease problem, the plum fruits seem to be disease resistant. I guess there is no such thing as perfect gardening!
Recipe for less toxic “dormant oil" to suffocate overwintering pests, such as aphids and mites.
INGREDIENTS
1 cup vegetable oil
2 tablespoon liquid soap
1 gallon water

Insect Control: Horticultural Oils

Bacterial Spot Info

Bacterial spot of peach factsheet

Peach Bacterial Spot

Peach and Nectarine Disease resistance Varieties

How to Prevent Diseases and Insects that Attack Peaches/Nectarine?
Notes - Chemical sprays for bacterial spot are not practical for the home grower. The best way to control bacterial spot is to select resistant peach varieties. Peeling fruit removes most traces of the disease.
- Spray program with dormant sprays and carry on through the growing season
- Collecting diseased fruit as soon as it appears and removing infected twigs and mummies from the trees will reduce the carry-over of brown rot to the next season.
- If fruit ripening occurs during a period of warm, wet weather, a very rigid spray program is required to control brown rot.
- It is important to begin spraying just before the fruit ripens. Delaying a spray program until rotten fruit is evident will result in very poor control regardless of the effort.
- Controll Peach Scab with chemical sprays applied at the "shuck split" stage and every 14 days for the next four to six weeks
- Never plant a peach tree in an old vegetable garden site. Root-knot nematodes can build up on many vegetables. The safest planting sites are portions of the yard where bermuda or other lawns have been established for years.
- Oak Root Rot disease is caused by a soil borne fungus that attacks and kills peach roots. The fungus will survive for many years in the soil on roots of hardwood trees long since removed. There is no control.
- Do not prune trees in October, November, December and January, wait until mid-February to prune the trees. Pruning in late winter reduces the chance of winter injury and infection by the bacterial canker organism.

Plum, Nectarine, Peach 3-in-1 Multi-budded Fruit Tree

Plum is a close relative of nectarine and peach fruits; it develops over few months period, from late winter to midsummer. For this multi-budded tree, plum is the dominant one; it is bearing 15 fruits, and almost covers half of the tree. Nectarine and Peach only produce 1 fruit for each branch. So, I try to prune down the plum to let nectarine and peach get more sunlight and catch up with normal height. So far, only the plum fruits are ripened and ready for summer harvest. See the progress here...



Nectarine Info
Plum
Peach

Multiple-Budded Fruit Tree: Peach, Plum, Nectarine

Most of the multi-budded fruit tree is peach, apricot, nectarine, or pear...My father-in-law once grafted multiple types of apple in one tree. I guess this is a new generation of multiple-budded cocktail fruit tree with plum, peach, and nectarine combination, please see (1) & (2) photos. The fruits are getting larger; some branches grow to different heights with dominant leaders on one side. Right now it is 6' tall; it probably needs pruning during fall season to keep the tree small and manageable.

So, what to do when pruning the fruit tree next time? Don't throw the branch away, try the drafting or budding technique, who knows probably miracle will happen ;-)






Useful links:
University of Missouri grafting technique (this is the best one)
http://extension.missouri.edu/publications/DisplayPub.aspx?P=G6971
According to Rothenberger and Starbuck @ UM, most varieties of a particular fruit or flowering species are interchangeable and can be grafted. Grafting techniques can be divided into two basic types, which are largely determined by the size of the understock. In some cases, a graft may be made to join a scion and understock of nearly equal size. The other type attaches a small scion to a much larger understock. In this case, several scions may be attached to the understock as in cleft or bark grafting.
Materials needed:

• Knife

• Grafting wax - After the graft is made, some covering must be used to keep it from drying out.

• Grafting tape - A special tape with a cloth backing that decomposes before girdling can occur. Tapes may be used for binding grafts where there is not enough natural pressure. Electrical and masking tapes are also

• Budding strips are elastic bands. They look like a wide rubber band that has been cut open.

• Nails - Veneer, bridge and inarching grafts require long, thin nails.

• Grafting tool- a blade used to split the stub and a wedge to hold the split open while the scions are inserted.

*** If you find other grafting or budding techniques and would like to share to all readers/gardeners, please post a comment. I'm happy to invite anyone who would like to leave message and share :-)

North Carolina State University: Grafting and Budding Nursery Crop Plants
http://www.ces.ncsu.edu/depts/hort/hil/ag396.html

Cornell University: Grafting and Budding
http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/courses/hort494/mg/reasons/ReasonsGBLeft.html

Grafting Method From Wikipedia: Approach grafting or inarching is used to join plants that are otherwise difficult to join. The plants are grown close together, and then joined so that each plant has roots below and growth above the point of union. Both scion and stock retain their respective parents that may or may not be removed after joining. Also used in pleaching. The graft can be successfully accomplished any time of year.

How To Plant A Multiple-Budded Fruit Tree (Video)

How to prune a 4 in 1 plum tree - California Gardening Forum

Fruit Trees: Training and Pruning Deciduous Trees http://homeorchard.ucdavis.edu/8057.pdf

Nursery: List of multi-budded fruit trees
Custom budding and contract growing

Diospyros Kaki Fuyu Persimmon Tree

This new Fuyu persimmon tree had already blossomed when I bought it. It is a replacement for the dead Nectarine tree (see here). The reason I pick another persimmon tree is because Persimmon can adapt to a wide range of soils and climates, and it's immune from most disease and insects (at least less maintenance than Nectarine tree). The leaves are glossy and leathery and may be yellow or reddish-purple in the fall. Persimmon flowers look like bell-shaped with creamy to greenish-yellow, fragrant, usually with 4 thick, recurved lobes and staminate flowers in 2-3-flowered clusters. It flowers in March-June and fruits in September-November. Small fruit is greenish to yellowish with highly astringent pulp before ripening, turning yellowish-orange to reddish-orange and sweet in the fall.

The Fuyu species are almost seedless. The wood of persimmon is hard, smooth, and even textured. Asian remedy uses unripe fruit and inner bark has been used in the treatment of fever, diarrhea, and hemorrhage. The fruits are used in puddings, cookies, cakes, custard, and sherbet; the dried, roasted, ground seeds have been used as a substitute for coffee.

Persimmon tree can tolerate hot, dry, poor soils, including various city conditions, but moist and well-drained soils provide best conditions. The most important is plant it in well-drained soil, one of my trees die due to poor drainage.

It is a long life tree; some trees have been reported to reach 150 years of age. Good fruit crops are borne every 2 years. Persimmon is slow growing and tree is usually not very large size. The tree sends down a deep taproot, which makes it a good species for erosion control but makes it difficult to transplant.

Most of the fruit trees will encounter some types of disease. So, watch out for the webworm and hickory horned devil that caused the diseases on persimmon tree. An infected tree lives 1-2 years after the wilting appears. Small branches severed by a twig girdler are often encountered; the wounds allow entry of a wilt fungus Cephalosporium Diospyri that can kill the persimmon tree. Like most of the fruit trees, persimmon tree also attract animals. Leaves and twigs of common persimmon are eaten in fall and winter by white-tailed deer. The fruit is eaten by various birds, deer, and other wild life.

Need to dig a bigger hole
Miracle-Gro® soil - with bad smell

Interesting readings:

http://www.seedtosupper.com/persimmons.html

Persimmon Fruits Fact
http://www.crfg.org/pubs/ff/persimmon.html

WHY FRUIT TREES ARE GRAFTED?
http://www.midfex.org/m/whygraft.html

Cocktail Tree?

The new tree begins to bear small fruit. It seems to have two fruits with velvety skin, one small fruit looks like peach with fuzzy skin, and the rest look like smoother skin. I ordered this tree online a year ago, not sure if it's a cocktail tree (it's listed on the the website as dwarf Fuyu persimmon tree). This tree starts to bloom with pink and white flowers (see previous photos). Is it possible to have this type of cocktail tree???

New Hybrid Nectarine tree - `Western Pride`

This is a new semi-dwarf 'Western Pride' nectarine tree. The inventors from California, typically hybridize a large number of nectarine and peach seedlings each year, ended up with this new and distinct variety of nectarine tree, which has been denominated varietally as 'Western Pride'.
Prunus persica - distinct variety broadly characterized by a large size, vigorous, self-fertile, productive and regular bearing tree. The fruit is uniformly large in size, acidic and sweet in flavor, globose in shape, freegstone in type, firm in texture, mostly red in skin color, and mature in mid July. The variety was a first generation cross using an unnamed freestone peach as the selected seed parent and `August Red` (U.S. Plant Pat. No.6,363) nectarine as the selected pollen parent.

A new and distinct variety of nectarine tree, substantially as illustrated and described, that is most similar to the `Summer Bright` nectarine, (U.S. Plant Pat. No. 7,049), byproducing yellow flesh nectarines that mature in the latter part of July, that have sweet acidic flavor, and that are mostly red in skin color, but is distinguished therefrom and an improvement thereon by requiring higher chilling, by blooming later, and by producing fruit that matures about 5 days later, is larger in size, and is freestone instead of clingstone.

Tree Size: Large, reaching a height of 12' [3.66 meters] on a 4th leaf graft on Nemaguard rootstock utilizing typical dorman pruning.

Vigor: Vigorous, responding typically to irrigation and fertilization.

Growth: Upright and dense.

Form: Vase formed.

Fertility: Self-fertile.

Production: Very productive, thinning necessary.

Bearing: Regular bearer, with no alternate bearing yet observed.

Plum Tree, Peach Tree, Other Fruit Trees Maintenance

From Flowers to Fruits
My plum tree and peach tree set too many fruits, it needs thinning for proper development.
Plum Tree
Peach TreeFruit Trees Maintenance
- needs to remove:
* weak or downward growing branches
* center and top of the tree/ long shoots
* water sprouts in an open area
* cross or interfere limbs that growing towards the center of the tree
* root suckers
* dense and crowded branches
* dead, diseased, or damaged wood

Pruning guide
Fruit Trees Training and Pruning

Fruit Tree & Insect Control

Semi-dwarf Plum fruit tree in my garden

Tree size:
Miniature tree = 6 - 8' tall
Dwarf tree = 8 to 12 feet tall
Semi-dwarf tree = 12 to 20 feet tall
Semi-dwarf trees are usually stronger and bear fruit faster than dwarf trees.
Most semi-dwarfing rootstocks do not control fruit tree size. Pruning makes a big difference in size. The best way to keep fruit trees smaller is by pruning during summer/fall.

http://www.fruit-trees.org

Less toxic “dormant oil" to suffocate overwintering pests, such as aphids and mites. INGREDIENTS
1 cup vegetable oil
2 tablespoon liquid soap
1 gallon water

Insect Control: Horticultural Oils

SPRING GARDEN - fruit tree flowers

Plum and peach treesVue Jardin© 2009