Chestnut blight treatments, three years in and I'm doubting my approach

I've been treating a row of American chestnuts on a customer's property in western Pennsylvania since spring of 2021. Used the standard hypovirulence injection method, the one everyone in the extension office recommends. Spent close to $900 on the kits alone, not counting my time. The trees looked stable for two summers, new growth was decent. But this August, two of the five showed cankers coming back hard, higher up on the trunk than before. The other three are holding, but I'm starting to think we're just buying time, not really saving anything. My old mentor says it's worth it if you get five extra years, the trees can still produce nuts. The customer's other option is cutting them down and planting disease-resistant hybrids, which cost around $150 each. I've gone back and forth all fall. Has anyone else seen hypovirulence fail after the third year, and at what point do you tell the homeowner it's time to pull the plug?

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matthewf402mo ago

if you get five extra years" really stuck with me, because that's exactly what my uncle said about his old pear tree before it finally gave up. He kept bandaging this thing for like six years, treating the same crack in the bark every spring, and every fall it would drop half its fruit early. One year we had a weird warm snap in February and the whole thing just split down the middle overnight. I showed up with my chainsaw and he was out there with duct tape and prayer, lol. Point is, sometimes you're not saving the tree, you're just saving the memory of it. And that's fine if the customer's okay paying for that, but nobody tells you when the memory gets more expensive than the new tree.

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