Disease. My tree is sick. It's depressing. My grafted sorbus domestica "Sossenheimer Riese" has an illness that seems to be spreading quicker than it is able to grow. I am really sad about this because it was my biggest true service tree.
There is now more dead brown buds than green ones. The tree seems to be dying quicker than it can grow;
The extremities of the branches die out and the bark peels off. The buds dry and turn brown. It's really ugly. Practically all branches of my tree are attained now.
Following the advice of a friend of mine who knows a lot about trees i cut off the top of the crown that was really badly disease ridden and i heavily mulched the tree with wood chips. Also i had originally planted a lot of comfrey around it.
If the tree doesn't show signs of improvement i am afraid that i will have to cut it because i already watched another one slowly get sick, dry out and die. This tree is growing in a field as part of 5 grafted sorbus domestica trees. They are all rare varieties that took me a long time to find, graft and plant. My original idea was to plant large fruited varieties together to make seed for growing new fruiting varieties and now my main tree is ill and a second one is starting to get sick. I don't know what this illness is.
Same disease on second grafted tree "Indigniente". If I cut all diseased parts off and put wound healing balm on will the tree not just get the disease again elsewhere?
This is what pretty much all sources of information that i researched indicate (internet, books, people)
Another part of the second tree affected by the disease. It is now still in a stage where i could cut off the affected parts but i am thinking if it doesn't outgrow it and heal itself it's not worth keeping. Also having the disease around enables me to check the resistance of the others much better.
I gave a tree to a neighbour and he also has branches that dry and die off but only 5% of the tree, so the whole thing is strange. The disease was already somehow hovering in the air here or present before i planted my trees otherwise they couldn't have gotten infected in the first place so even if i cut everything off and use chemicals or whatever what's to stop the disease from popping up again?
Hello Philip,
ReplyDeleteI have something to tell that happened about 25 years ago.
My now deceased uncle had planted spruces (Fichten) in Büsingen to protect from the neighbors. But they were attacked by bark beetles (Borkenkäfer). According to literature he should have cut and burnt them. But he was so sad so he tried something before. He circled the trees with aluminium paper bands at about 50 cm and 1m50 height, moisted them and branched a 12 V battery charger for a whole night. Next day all the larvae, including the ones at the top of the trees, were dead, lots of small holes with sawdust, and the trees recovered, one of them had already a dead summit, it launched a side branch to create a new apical burgeon.
I always wondered if this very unharmful (no chemicals) technique could also be suitable for other diseases, like fungi diseases.
I know that you want nature only, but a try with this would be so interesting ! Why not try it in your orchard ?
I don't have an orchard, and there are not sick trees at my mother's garden, so I never could confirm this story that I head to listen to a few times in my live ;)
If this could work (let us hope for miracle), then it would be feasible to handle old monumental trees in the country side with car batteries...
Arnould