Fire Blight
When we first moved into our urban St. Louis home, we cut down an old, dying tree and replaced it with an apple tree. How wonderful it will be, I thought, to go into my backyard and pick a delicious crunchy and crisp apple straight from the tree. It would remind me of my childhood in California where the memory of those apples taste far better than any real apple I've tasted since. That old apple tree bares many memories -- the day it reached out and caught my sister's kite and entangled the string throughout its limbs, its limbs cut and used for "much needed" spankings, the pink blossoms that would spring forth each April as if the tree were cotton candy. I suppose I neglected the tree, hoping I would plant it, water it occasionally and let the sun nourish the fruit until it was ready for picking. I knew it needed a good pruning but I was afraid I might prune it wrong and kill it so I left it to grow gnarly, each limb fighting for access to the li...