I have a pear, apple, peach, nectarine, plum, apricot and cherry trees which have new leaves that are curling up around the edges and are deformed. Is this peach leaf curl?
Peach leaf curl is caused by a fungus and does not affect pear and apple trees. The problem at hand is caused by the western flower thrip or onion thrip. Thrips are small, 1/25-1/50th inch long or so, and lay their eggs in flower or leaf buds or on very young leaf tissue. They feed with their rasping sucking mouth parts and cause irreversible damage to the plant tissue, flowers and fruit. Five to 15 generations per year can be produced. To see if you have thrips hold a piece of white paper under the damaged leaves and tap them sharply. Thrips will fall on the paper and start to walk around. They rarely fly because they are weak flyers but will hop. There have been vast numbers of thrips this year because of the good winter rains we had which caused cool season weeds, mustard particularly, to thrive. Thrip populations build up to high levels on these weeds and when they die down, due to warm weather, the thrips migrate to fruit trees, roses and other perennial flowers. Control: Thrips a
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