Help with diseased(?) fruit trees

somewhere, PA

My boss has a small orchard in "northern Ca." in the Silicon Valley area. He has an expanding issue with some sort of infection on his apricot & peach trees. He says they get wounds that ooze brown stuff. He cut out a sample and dug in - could not find any evidence of an insect bore hole. Whole limbs die off when they are infected - the leaves shrivel up and die. The gardener pruned w/o sanitizing the equipment and now the problem is worse. A tree near a pile of limbs pruned is much worse than others. I'm suspecting some sort of viral, bacterial or fungal infection.

Any ideas of what the problem is? And more importantly, how to stop it & even better, cure it?

Thanks
Tam

Sacramento, CA(Zone 9a)

Tam, I suspect there is something else going on in this case, but I live in Northern California and this year has been especially bad for things like peach leaf curl to the point where my peach tree lost almost all of its leaves before growing them back in the last couple weeks.

Here's a blog post by one of our local gardening gurus on peach leaf curl and what can be done to minimize it: http://farmerfredrant.blogspot.com/2011/04/peach-leaf-curl.html



somewhere, PA

Thanks GardenSox. I don't see any mention of the oozing brown stuff from the woody part of the tree. I have the impression that the leaves curl up and fall off after the oozing wound is evident on the limb.

Tam

Sacramento, CA(Zone 9a)

Yeah, the oozing is what made me think it wasn't peach leaf curl but since so many of the trees around here do have it this year I wonder if that isn't a contributing factor in your bosses trees not being able to fight off whatever is causing the oozing?

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