As a home orchard man I can identify with your problem of trying to deduce the dosage for a gallon of spray from a hundred gallon recipe. What I do is study teaspoons, tablespoons, cups, gallons (You can find on the Web calculators that will do the cipherin’ for you) and then proportion out the dosage for how much spray I want to mix. As for the cutin’ ‘er out, I’ll talk about it. From a down to earth viewpoint, as the tree grows, that chore is going to grow along with it, unless you can grow a tail or wings. But you can take assurance that Spring is the worst time for fire blight. Summer heat and less rain will slow it down. (It’s raining now.)
You probably don’t want to use my battle plan; you’re probably not lazy enough. Other than closely observing the war and picking up and disposing of a dead limb now and again, I don’t get involved. But I do pick up fallen fruit each fall and feed it to the chickens or use it to lure deer or feral hogs into sniper range. It puts out a pleasing aroma. (Beware of the wasps) Looked at from a certain slant, it’s a hard world; witness your struggling pomes.
Presently there are four pear trees on The Place. Two, separated by about forty feet of sandy loam, are the last of the Old Orchard. Per piecing together snippets of family lore, they are near a hundred. Per that lore, my paternal grandmother set them out shortly before the house in which we live was built, 1919. They jarred fruit by the half-gallons to help winter them over, mostly figs, pears, and clingstone peaches. They depended on the fruit trees; we don’t.
For the two Old Timers, if I had to name cultivars, it would be Bartlett for the good one and an I Have No Idea But I Don’t Want Another One for the bad one. (But in doing so I could be as wrong as war) The two are starkly different. The one that has been good in the past–I’ll refer to her as Bartlett–is about forty feet tall and has filled many bellies and jars with succulent fruit. Since I have known it, the other has always been a wimp, and its produce has always been wimpy. I’ve probably tasted no more than a score of pears off it over the years, those just to see if Time had changed its nature; it hasn’t. I probably should have uprooted it years ago to get it out of its bacterial misery and to rescue me from having to watch its slow decline, but I’m unable to erase something that’s lived here longer than I have.
Forty feet is out of lethal range for my backpack sprayer. I have been high in Bartlett, tossing her fat fruit down to sure-handed catchers on the ground, but those climbs are long in my rear view mirror. So, cutting out the enemy is out. In that reflection there is no fire blight. We had never even heard the term. The best I figure, it arrived in our area about thirty-five years ago. How did it get here, on a bird’s foot, riding the wind? Where did it come from, Pome Hell? Much is a mystery.
Another pear tree, given as a gift to my father, is about forty years old. It survives about eighty yards north of Bartlett. When it can manage to slip an undamaged pear past the enemy–which is as hard to do as slippin’ daylight past a rooster–the fruit is fabulous. She–I would again guess Bartlett–is a large tree also, but not as large as Bartlett.
So I employed a covert ploy: genetics. About twenty year ago I set two bare root whips, a Moonglow and a Kieffer; both, I read and still read, are resistant to fire blight. (Any organism resists the enemy, I think. A marketing ploy, you think?) I set them about a hundred yards due west of Bartlett, my thinking being that the prevailing wind here, SSE, would not be continually remanning enemy lines. And it’s good dirt.
Best I remember, the Moonglow survived less than ten years. Her fruit didn’t make you crave so that you begged her to give you some more. She and three apple trees whose cultivars I don’t recall–one was a cooking apple, I do remember, which Help Meet really liked–are the only trees which I have set that FB totally annihilated.
But I don’t overtly get involved in the fighting. (I’ve considered trying an Arkansas Black. What cultivars have you set?) The Kieffer produces more than we use; we’re not as dependent on the trees as my grandmother was. Taste and texture are good, but not on the level of Bartlett’s in her day. Kieffer appears to fight a stronger fight against fire blight than Bartlett does, but she has genetics, possibly, and the vigor of youth, assuredly, going for her.
Back to the tail or wings, unless you can do it, I suggest that you keep your trees, which look young, at a manageable size for the home orchard woman. How well pome trees kept pruned to a few feet will look and produce, I don’t know. But I do know that if the field of battle grows too large and the enemy gains the high ground, an army with limited artillery range and mobility will be helpless to the destruction raining down.
The rain’s stopped, but it’s still overcast.
Try to have fun.
