Good morning. This is C-MAC with urban farmers. It's a beautiful day in northern California. Go overcast and we might even have some rain by Tuesday. Hopefully some rain by next weekend. It's early spring and fruit trees have leafed out. If you have time this weekend, half an hour to an hour of time. There are two chores that are important to do. We're going to walk around. I'm going to introduce you to one of my favorite diseases for the four people that are new to growing fruit trees. Then I'm going to show you probably the most important thing you can do right now to improve the taste and quality of your fruit. Let's go and before we go, never go near your fruit trees without these guys. You can improve fruit trees almost any time. Alright, let's get started. So on this walkway I planted two fruit trees, two peaches. This is an early peach, a sun crest. Right here is a late peach area also. Two of my favorite peaches. They're pruned too dimensionally because I don't let the trees get in the sidewalk and as a result since one side of it is all gone, they're easy to look into and see what's going on with the trees. They're growing on a space about oh I would say four feet wide and these trees have been in the ground for about three years. So let's talk about the disease. If you're growing peach or nectarine, you are most likely to get this disease. It's a peach leaf curl, starts with blemishes like these. Looks like a red blotch on the leaf and eventually it distorts the leaf. It caused the leaf to elongate. I don't know how well you can see this. Maybe I can just cut it and hold it here. The leaf turns color. Sometimes it's gray, sometimes it's whitish, sometimes it's brown. This is not that tissue. It's very flexible. But leaves change color. Here's another one. This one has turned brown. And the reason this disease is a good disease for people that are growing fruit trees is many fold. First it's a great teacher. It's it comes back year in year out. So if you don't learn about them the first year you get a chance to learn about it the second year and on. The other thing that's good about this disease is you can see it with that with naked eye from 10 feet away. It's kind of spongy. And lastly it's a it's a forgiving teacher. If you fail to treat it this year it will come back next year and won't penalize you a great deal. But if you ignore it year in year out then yes you lose your tree. This is what happens in an advanced stage of the disease. The leaves elongate. This is about probably twice the size of the leaf right next to it. And in case you're interested to know how the disease works basically the fungus gets between the cells of the leaves stimulates the cells and then the cells begin to divide and grow in these out of space weird shapes. Look at this. Oh got a little friend in here. The other thing about this disease is that by the time you spot it there really isn't much you can do about it. You can just walk over to this tree. You can remove the leaves you can prune the branches but it's it's really kind of like trying to treat common cold. If your child gets common cold you can comfort them but there really isn't much you can do to cure the disease. This is the same way. Right now there's nothing you can do. Then what happens is the disease the infected leaves will fall. Beautiful green leaves like this will come back in its place and in no time flat you're gonna forget that you had this disease. So it's important. If you have leaf curl that you write it down or better yet send me an email and I will remind you when time comes to treat it. And that's another feature of this this guy is that it puts you in rhythm with nature. You no longer think of your gardening chores one week or one day at a time. You have to treat this in November when the when you have harvested the fruit the leaves are down that's the time where we can we can deal with this. So it's a great great low disease just all you have to do is observe it write it down so you don't forget. Remember I told you to bring your pruners here's a branch that's pretty much dead nothing on it and there's no reason to leave this on the tree. Next fall this time these low branches are gonna look exactly like the branches that are adornment and you won't know the difference. So now is the time to clean all these little twigs that have died off of your tree. The other thing we need to do is thin the fruit look how many pieces of fruit are on this one little tiny branch. In fact look at this a pencil size branch I counted it has 16 or 17 pieces of fruit there's no way this branch can carry them any fruit you can probably leave one maybe two on this branch and that's it. So they all have to be removed. I typically use my wrist as a guide and in the space of my wrist I let one piece of fruit to stay. There's a whole video on this that I made last year I'll put a link here on the bottom you can go and check it out it gives you the reasons behind why we do this as well as how to go about doing it. That's it if you have any questions feel free to write to me you know where I am or write a comment below and I'll be glad to answer your questions. Thank you.