Dead Fuji?

My favorite apple is probably Fuji. I like Rome's too but fuji's are best. They're not a pretty as a the familiar red delicious but the red delicious apples were selectively bred for looks, not for taste. I ordered a few more fruit trees in the spring and one was a fuji apple.

For some reason, the best fruits and vegetables are always the hardest to grow. It's happens too often for it to just be a coincidence. Fuji apples are no exception. I've had a bad case of fire blight in my pears this year. I've been cutting blighted branches out, removing them from the area, and even dipping my pruning shears in bleach between cuts so I don't spread the bacteria. I havent' seen any fire blight in a couple of weeks and thought I might have been out of the woods. I wasn't.

Fuji's are very suseptable to fire blight. In general fire blight isn't really an apple disease. Apple trees can get it but it's not usually serious...unless you have fuji apples. I check my trees every day and didn't see anything on Sunday. Yesterday (Monday) evening I found this:

Fuji apple with fire blight

Every single branch is curled at the tip, and the leaves are turning brown.

close up of fire blight

It looks like fire blight. If it was one or two branches, I'd cut off the bad branches several inches below the damage. It's the whole top of the tree so I cut off the top of the tree. The worst part is that this proves it's still in my little orchard and will probably jump back into the other trees.

fuji apple stick

I don't know if it will survive. The blight might have already gotten into the trunk. If not, It might put out suckers and actually make it. I had a 12' tall walnut tree break off in a bad windstorm a month ago and had to cut it off 3' from the ground. It didn't have a branch on it and it came back pretty fast. Of course the walnut has 3 years worth of healthy roots and the fuji's only been in the ground for 4 months.

the walnut recovering