My topworked pear trees were a spectacular failure.  The trees came down with fireblight, and I stuck my head in the sand so long they managed to pass the bacteria on to the apple trees.

I started out blaming the scionwood source since we'd never had fireblight on our farm previously.  However, some research made me rethink that and start pointing the finger back at myself.  It turns out that extremely heavy pruning makes it far more likely you'll get fireblight in your trees, and my topworking involved some very heavy pruning.  (I'm surprised the information I read on topworking pears didn't include that warning, but I guess the websites were geared at commercial orchards who spray antibiotics.)

Meanwhile, something about the spring weather also seems to have promoted fireblight.  My sister called me to say that her pear trees 90 miles away are so badly fireblighted, she might have to cut them down.  Like me, she'd never seen fireblight on her farm before, and she didn't do any crazy topworking.  So it's possible that the disease would have struck whether I pruned heavily or not.

Better late than never, I pruned out all of the damaged branches.  But I still might have to cut my pear trees down too since the trunks have lesions all the way to the ground.  I'd just assumed one of our cats was using the trunk as a scratching post, but closer examination suggests the wounds are more likely to be another symptom of fireblight.

The good news is that the phoebe pictured at the beginning of this post seems to be taking a major dent out of our Japanese beetle population this year.  A pair of the insect-eating birds is nesting in the barn, right next door to our grapes (also known as "Japanese beetle mecca").  In previous years, I've picked huge numbers of beetles off the row of grapes, but this year there only seem to be a few beetles...and lots of bird droppings.  If only the phoebes would head over to the raspberries and continue their good work!