As a new member, I wish to thank UBC for this service. I live at 750 meters elevation in North Carolina, near Asheville. Have a Bing and a Montgomery Cherry tree in my back yard, each 6 years old. This past weekend the Bing Cherry was looking like it was close to the time to harvest. The Bing cherries looked good and plentiful. Almost overnight a white mold or fungus formed on these cherries, not the leaves. Under the white mold was a bruise of brownish color on the cherry. It was soft and covered 20 - 40% of the individual cherry surface area. Nearly 95% of the cherries on the Bing tree were infected like this leaving me dumbfounded. The leaves and the Bing tree appear healthy and undamaged. Only the smaller, not fully ripened cherries escaped this, whatever it is. The Montgomery tree did not experience this and its cherries are continuing to ripen. Can someone please identify what happened to this Bing cherry tree, and how I might prevent it in the future? In the past, I've only had to fight the birds and Japanese beetle in my orchard. Thank you so much. Alan
Bing Tree's problem probably not brown rot Thank you for your reply. I looked up the website on brown rot that you referenced. Doesn't sound like that's what my tree had. The fungus or whatever it was, was pure white in color and it was only on the cherries, not on any of the leaves. We had a fine spring, it flowered very nicely, had a wet March then dry Apr, May and (so far) June. It rained Saturday afternoon, 6/10ths of an inch over 3 hours or so. Weather remained foggy and damp that night and early next morning. When I went out to harvest late that morning, boom, the white mess was all over the cherries. I stripped all the cherries off the tree, then raked them away from the tree. The tree and leaves look great today, 4 days after.
I'd recommend doing a bit more searching around on the web re: [GOOGLE]cherry tree brown rot[/GOOGLE] (and an image search), e.g., the image of the sporulation on a sour cherry on this page
I'm not an expert, but it sounds like a powdery mildew to me, similar to what comes on squash plants.
