That’s the best phone photo I have, I can try again if I have to. Now, the background:
Last year I bought a cherry sapling from a mail order orchard, and I planted it early last Autumn. For explanation: its a graft of two varieties, the yellow sweet cherries and the dark sweet cherries (I wanted to be sure of max cross pollination ability.) I looked closely, it seems to be a graft onto another rootstock, and two grafts onto the grafted stem.
It was flourishing well until this week when I noticed every new shoot was chewed up and gone. One gone shoot had some sticky sap and some tiny ants in the shoot, I don’t know if they’re the cause or the symptom. I don’t see aphids, for example. Nor other insects.
Every leaf and petiole has those yellow growths. They may be normal parts of cherry trees, as my mother reports. I picked one open, it doesn’t contain a scale insect that I could see. I suppose it may be some sort of bacterial or fungal canker or it may be how cherry trees bud, some seem to be softening and lengthening, now that the shoots are gone.
Maybe tomorrow I’ll bring some photos and maybe a leaf to a garden center for expert diagnosis.
For now, I’m just spraying the tree with some insecticidal soap as a precaution. It really is a small tree at this point, so that’s not much work.
I’d suspect I’d see other evidence of deer, and there are tomatoes tightly around that tree. I’d suspect its too tall for rabbits. Now squirrels, I won’t rule them out. I’ll have to see what a garden center will diagnose and suggest.
My black plum tree was positively gross looking last week. Every leaf had 3 or more of those darn Japanese Beetles humping, eating the leaves and probably laying eggs. The Mister Sevin dusted it and my broccoli (leaves were getting chewed up).
Birds and squirrels decimate my strawberries every year. So much so that I’ve decided the strawberry patch belongs to nature and not me. Still makes me mad when the birds peck at the strawberries but leave them on the plant so I think that maybe I can pop one in my mouth but when I pick it it has all these holes in it. Stupid nature.
I suspect wildlife is the culprit. Mr.Wrekker pruned my apple trees up very high to keep deer from eating low hanging fruit. Now they stand on their hind legs to get an apple. If he prunes it higher I will have to have scaffolding to get an apple for myself.
Deer have been my biggest problem with young trees. Until I got my motion activated sprinklers set up, I had two new cherry saplings stripped of leaves one night.
I’ve also seen rabbits pull down saplings - bend them over - to get to the new leaves.
Depending on the height, rabbits, deer, or rodents. Rodents can climb. Deer can get up about 7 feet but they would have eaten every leaf not just the shoot. I’m guessing mice or similar.
Taking the garden center’s advice, I’ve pruned each chewed up shoot 3 internodes down. I’ve sprayed the tree with neem oil-based pesticide, in case this is a fungal or mite infestation. I cultivated in some grub killer and ant killer around the base. And yes, those yellow growths are a natural part of the cherry leaf.
The garden center doesn’t believe that squirrels are a likely cherry shoot eating culprit. Something digs up my recent plantings, but that could be anything, from curious squirrels, to squirrels burying things, to skunk babies to raccoons to neighborhood cats. But I do hope that rodents aren’t a thing in my yard. That reminds me, I gotta throw some blood meal where I cultivated, to repel diggers.
I hope your cherry tree makes it. (I remember a big tree full of sweet cherries, up the block, the whole neighborhood was invited to take away as many as they could find, a great memory.) . and I knew a farm with a ‘garden kitchen’ positively stuffed with healthy fruits and vegetable plants. I don’t know how they did it, with so many diseases, animals, and instects around.
Have you noticed any descendants of George Washington skulking around your yard lately? Or maybe someone possessed by his time-traveling spirit? We have to consider all the options.