Fruit tree leaves turning red brown/wilting

Hi,
First time trying fruit trees and over the past few weeks I've noticed a steady colour change to the leaves - started on my cherry tree and now my pear and some of the apple trees are turning. I've done a bit of googling and I'm a bit befuddled as to what it could be (because the internet says it could be literally everything from phosphorus, waterlogged to undernourished!). Would anyone have some solid advice and a few steps to try and narrow down the cause? For background, soil isn't great, quite claggy though I did my best to break it up when planting. We are also high up on a hill and there is very little shelter from the sometimes harsh winds so wondered if it was wind burn or alike too

Many thanks

 

Your trees are dropping leaves early as they're stressed, so they're behaving as if it were late autumn.
So it's trying to identify what is causing the stress.

Around here in Essex we went many weeks without a drop of rain and I noticed that one of my blackcurrant bushes had about 15 healthy stems with plenty of berries just withered. The leaves just slowly died and the berries shrivelled. The majority of the bush was fine.
When i done a bit of digging, I found the soil to be bone dry - the bush was also near a fence so didn't get as much rain as the other 2 which were fine.
So in my case it was down to a lack of water.
I've had almost no rhubarb this year for the same reason.

Young trees need a lot of water for the 1st season or so to help them get established.
They must also be staked properly so that winds don't continually rock the tree and break new roots that are trying to form to take up water and nutrients.

 

We have had extremes of weather since the long very wet winter. All of this stresses trees of any kind.
My quince is showing similar signs as your fruit trees. The long,very hot and dry spell early in the year will definitely have affected trees just as they were coming into leaf. I live quite high up and the gale force winds also dehydrated and decimated young foliage. I have had several days of gale force wind again this week bringing down a lot of tree foliage.
I doubt there is any disease on your fruit trees, maybe the claggy soil has not helped. You could try digging down near the root balls to see if the sub soil is very dry.

 

I hope I am proved wrong but many indications suggest that summer is over and now we have Autumn......(09-07-24)

 

It's been Autumn around here ever since autumn last year

 

Every year the crab apple trees in my street start losing leaves around now, this year is no different.
I think its a combination of things but believe it or not drought is probably the main reason.

Just dug up three suckers on my Musa basjoos and the ground is pretty wet on top with the recent rains but bone dry underneath.
We have had in excess of 30 mm of rain in the last few days, and its still not down around the roots.
Kind of shows how pointless a garden hose is, unless just put at the base of a plant and allowed to trickle for a hour or so.

 

Thanks everyone, I've been afraid to overwater, particularly as I'm in Northern Ireland which still manages to be wet and windy whatever the season but maybe I've been too cautious with them. They're staked and that so will do a little dig to see what I can see under the top layer which always looks wet

I guess you just leave the leaves as is and don't remove them?

 

I'm going to say largely the opposite here. Your climate and conditions will be pretty similar to mine.
If you didn't improve the clay before planting, there's a good chance they're sitting in a sump. Clay is a great growing medium, but in consistently wet areas, it doesn't drain well, or dry out to any great extent, which then causes problems.
An exposed site means you'll always get a bit of colouring of foliage too. That's pretty normal, regardless of the time of year and the weather.

Autumn temps, and colouring of foliage, traditionally starts in August here where I am, and you could feel the change in the air around the end of the first week, and now it's more likely to be the 2nd week because there's definitely a change happening.
The colouring up of foliage isn't for the same reason as in southern areas, where it's usually the lack of water that causes stress and therefore early foliage colour changes.