On Thu, 17 Feb 2005 01:18:42 +0000, Brian Allen wrote:

Hello,

I recently returned from a year of military duty and found my poor
neglected fledgling orchard in southwest Ohio has been seriously afflicted
by some type of a problem other than the expected deer damage and mouse
girdling. I was gone all last year, so the trees got no care whatsoever
during that time. Hopefully this is a common problem (and therefore will
have a well known solution), but I have not had any luck in identifying
it. I work and getting to the county extension office would be a bit of a
pain, so I thought the experts in this forum could probably identify my
issue with a glance. The problem affects many types of trees and is very
widespread. The symptoms are that the bark on the smaller branches and
twigs appears to be 'split', for a few to up to 16 or so inches in length.
Affected branches are mostly under about a half inch in diameter. There
are actually wood fibers protruding from the areas of split bark. The
bark has grown up around the split, indicating the problem probably
occurred in the spring and the branch continued to grow at a normal or
nearly normal rate. The problem seems to be affected by the sun as all
the splits are on the undersides or on the north sides of the branches.
In my orchard nearly 100% of my 30 or so trees are affected, including
apple, plum, pear, peach, birch, and cherry. Curiously I have one north
star cherry which does not appear to have the problem. Maple and birch
trees are also affected along with some of the native brush I cannot give
the proper name for. Nut trees, cedars, Osage (hedgewood), cottonwood,
and sycamore do not appear to be affected. I cannot find any evidence of
insect damage, and the fact that the problem appears on the shaded side of
the branch leads me to suspect some type of fungal rot, but I would like
to pinpoint the exact type if possible.

Check out some pictures at http://home.earthlink.net/~drbjape/

Any help in identifying this would be appreciated. Any treatment ideas
would be welcome also, but once I can identify the problem I can probably
find the cure on the web or in the literature.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Brian

Good day Brian. Glad to see you made it back, hope you get to stay now.

You have a really strange problem runing through your orchard. I looked at
your pics and then I hit the books. At first, I thought you maybe seeing
the effects of bark blast due to freezing temps, but then I re-read your
post and seen that you stated that all affected limbs were north facing.
Winter damage is generally south western in it direction. After looking
through my master gardeners hand-outs, I went over to the hortsense site.

http://pep.wsu.edu/hortsense/
I would suspect that your trees are being affected anthracnose. Take a
peek at the hortsence site and see if it looks right to you. Here's the
direct link to the page in question:

http://pep.wsu.edu/hortsense/scripts...cat egoryID=3

Sorry, it's a large link address. The hortsense site uses frames so
linking to pages is a bit of a bugger.

Generally the ag office also houses the master gardeners office also. The
masters are volunteers and I'm sure someone would stop by your place and
take a peek for you. Or you could drop off some samples for the ag office
on your way to work ..ect. Take a gander at the warren county ag &
natural resources page to get their contact info.

http://warren.osu.edu/ag/ag.htm

Good luck.

--
Yard Works Gardening Co.
http://www.ywgc.com