Hi! we tried to restart trees by leaving a few nodes above the graft,
but failed miserably. The darn trees never re-sprouted. We had much
better success pruning out the diseased portions. We also found
sterilizing shears was a waste of time. The article can be found at:
Toussaint, V., and
I finally figured out what is going on. Because of the earlier infection, the
tree bark is covered with fireblight bacteria even though the wood is not
infected. A cut with pruning sheers inevitably re-infects the tree at the cut
location.
A real important step in controlling fireblight is to
Hello Axel, For three consecutive years we compared sterile shears vs
non sterile shears. As long as you are cutting in healthy wood
(obviously) we observed the same percentage of reinfection. I'm not
sure what data you have to support your claim, but our observations
simply don't support
