Peach/Nectarine tree

Last year I bought a nectarine tree which actually turned out to produce peaches. Anyway, not a problem as I like both. This year it produced masses of flowers and now has lots of fruit buds but now the leaves look very sorry for themselves. They are curling up and have strange distortions on them. Hope these photos are good enough to show what I mean. So, is this a disease or just something I've done wrong like over/under watering it? Will it affect the fruit?

 

No expert but i'm guessing thats 'Peach leaf curl'. Check over at the RHS web site. theres loads of info there. I had a peach I grew from seed and it was about seven years before it fruited. As a youngster it lived indoors and then moved outside on a south facing wall. Every year the fruit was the best we have ever tasted both in size and taste. It had to go when we built the conservatory.

 

you have peach leaf curl , and its a fungus , most or all of the products that are used to control it are hard to get hold off in the UK and have been withdrawn from use , you may have more luck with living in France , they say pick the leaves off , but the one I had died in the end and £ 30 down the pan after just two years its was a cracker little dwarf plant ,the fungus its spread over the winter months with rain drops splashing the spores over the plant so keeping in the greenhouse over winter helps.
We will see what the others may say about treating I did use Bordeaux Mixture which did help but I coudnt get hold of any more

Spruce

 

Thanks guys, it does look like Peach leaf curl. Will try and get the Bordeaux mix but it seems that you need to use it in the Autumn/early spring and there was no sign of it then. I'll pick off all the diseased leaves for now and see what happens to the fruit and then treat any new leaves that appear

 

@Spruce - Bordeaux Mixture is still available on ebay if you use that site

 

Peach leaf curl without a doubt.

 

Peach leaf curl, not found a cure, although it tends to lessen later in the season, but by then the damage is done.
The recommended, "remove affected leaves", is one of those old garden remedies that gets quoted, but unless you remove all the leaves it wont work.

I used to grow some half decent peaches back in the 80s, but dont stand a chance these days, leaf curl turns up every year, the trees look bare by late June but usually make a come back after that, but its mostly too late for the fruit.
The fruit often suffers from a kind of mildew also, gets white spots.

 

One trick that works is to make a canopy of polythene or other material over your tree - it is rain that spreads the spores of the fungus, if the leaves stay dry the disease doesn't seem to get hold.