I planted fruit trees this spring: 30 different varieties of dwarf apples; 20 different varieties of plums and 3 pears. I have tiny slugs on the bosc and honey sweet pears and on a moyer plum. On another pear I have tiny red dots on every leaf. Should I remove these trees? I do not want these problems spread to the other trees. I do not want to spray harmful dhemicals. Pat Lundsteen
Google "Pear slugs" or "Pear sawfly" for your little black slugs. As to the red dots, without a pic...? Start with a search on "shot hole fungus". How you control the creepies and critters, from compost tea
to full-on chemical attack; is up to you.
Careful about the red dots. I almost wiped some out until I realized they were baby ladybugs, which eat many more aphids than adults do. Many people buy them.
John S
PDX OR
[quote="Pat Lundsteen":1pmubd1s]I planted fruit trees this spring: 30 different varieties of dwarf apples; 20 different varieties of plums and 3 pears. I have tiny slugs on the bosc and honey sweet pears and on a moyer plum. On another pear I have tiny red dots on every leaf. Should I remove these trees? I do not want these problems spread to the other trees. I do not want to spray harmful dhemicals. Pat Lundsteen[/quote:1pmubd1s]
Are you sure they are slugs? here are two links to help [url:1pmubd1s]http://plant-disease.ippc.orst.edu/[/url:1pmubd1s] and [url:1pmubd1s]http://uspest.org/pnw/insects[/url:1pmubd1s] the pictures help a lot
in both text look under the tree type like apple or pear both will show you 99.9% of the diseases and the other insects. Under the recommendations you will find cultural methods up to commercially applied chemicals you choose what works for you.
you won't find anything about compost teas because they haven't been scientifically been proven, that might change someday but for now that is the status.
Randy
Yamhill County Master Gardener
Agree, the little slug looking things are pear slugs as stated above.
Google for "Pear Leaf Blister Mite" to see if the red dots are indeed caused by this pest. Quite common.
The hard thing about proving compost tea is that there are so many recipes and most people at universities don't know how to make it, or even what part is important. They get to do their research when a corporation sponsors it mostly. Look at the uproar when grad student Daniel Donato published in Science that forests recover more quickly when the fallen timber is not harvested. The president of the OSU told the magazine not to print the article! It was highly shameful. No corporation is going to sponsor a study of compost tea because if it works, it tells the people not to buy their product. Who wants to sponsor that?
In addition, some studies are poorly designed. The study last year that was supposed to show that conventional produce is as good as organic went from wwII to present. Well, most produce was organic until the last couple of decades, so for most of the study, they were comparing organic to organic. No wonder they found very little difference.
There are published, peer reviewed studies that show the efficacy of compost tea. However, until there are uniform standards, it will be hard to figure out what works and what doesn't. I was making fungal compost tea wrong for a year or two and wondered why it didn't work. Elaine Ingham told me how to fix it and now it works great. Making compost tea is a little bit like making a fantastic meal. Nobody makes a scientific proof that a delicious meal can be made, they just try to make it, and many fail unless they do it very carefully.
John S
PDX OR