Whats Killing Our fruit Trees?

Peach Tree Bore

What’s killing our peach and cherry trees? That’s the question I asked myself when we were at our farm late last March and I noticed our peach and cherry trees were under a lot of stress. With me just learning to be a farmer I had no idea what it could be.  So when we went home I started researching online and found the most likely culprit was the Peach Tree Bore. When we went back to the farm again in May I looked for the signs of the Peach Tree Bore and sure enough… that’s what was causing the damage.

In this post I will show you what the peach bore looks like and the signs to look for and what you can do to get rid of and prevent them from harming your trees.

What is the Peach tree bore?

The peach tree bore is a moth that looks like a wasp that lays eggs in the  ground at the base of your fruit trees.  Once the eggs hatch out as a larve that looks like a skinny grub, it burrows into your tree trunk just below ground. They like stone fruit trees which are all fruit trees that have a pit in the center of the fruit, like nectarine, plum, cherry, and of course peach. It usually won’t kill a mature tree but if your trees are very young like ours it can kill them.

peach tree bore larvae

 

What to look for

The first thing you may notice is your trees may look like they are under stress or dying. The two cherry trees looked like they had died but sprouted again down towards the bottom of the tree trunck. The peach trees started growing water sprouts to get more leaves to help support it. When a young tree does this it is a sure sign that it is under stress from something.

You can see here what is called water sprouts that are nothing more than many small branches that sprout out from the limbs of our peach trees.

If it looks like your trees are under stress dig into the ground at the base of your tree and look for a clear jelly like substance that will be covering an entrance hole of the larvae. If you see this then you know it is from the peach tree bore.

How we treated our trees

The first thing I did was locate several entrance holes of the larvae and I used an old fishing jig I had in my tackle box and I straightned out with a pair of pliers and I jabbed into the holes to kill the larvae.

Use a small wire or a straightened fishing hook like I did hear to kill the larvae.

Now if we lived there this is all I would have to do.  I could keep watch over the trees and check on them to make sure no other larvae are boring into out trees so I keep our fruit pesticide free… but we don’t so I have to resort to using chemicals until the day we move there.

What we used to kill the Peach tree bore.

I used Borer-Minor Killer by mixing 1 ounce to a gallon of water and I poured it all over the tree and around the base on the ground to help kill any larvae that I might not have killed with my fishing hook. Believe me when I tell you, I don’t like using any insecticide at all but since we are not there to constantly watch over our trees I felt I had to resort to this to help protect our investment in these trees.

Me watering some of our fruit trees on our farm with the Borer-Minor insecticide.

The best defense against the peach tree bore is to have healthy trees, but our trees were under stress from last summers drought they had in Iowa and that caused our trees not to produce much sap and this allowed the Bore to bore into our trees and the tree didn’t have enough sap flowing to drown the larvae. If we could have been there to water our trees last summer we probably wouldn’t have this problem.

I don’t know if our peach and cheery trees are going to make it but it was a lessoned learned. At least we know now what we are up against and will do a better job of protecting our trees from here on out.

 

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