Every season brings fresh joy to the gardener. Why shed a tear over the final strawberry when a bowl of ripe, juicy plums awaits you?
But these anxiously anticipated plums can disappoint. There could be a tiny crop. They might be cracked, small and hard or brown and rotting. Unwelcome grubs could tunnel inside the fruit or jays pierce the skin, letting flies and wasps tuck in.
The only solution is to grit your teeth and try to improve things for next year. Undoubtedly the commonest and most frustrating problem is beyond your control: fruit splitting.
The day before writing, I was up the ladder, picking off split greengages at the top of the tree trained against the house.
The warm dry spell had hardened and dried the skins and then came the rains. This caused the splitting.
The tree pumped up large quantities of water to the fruits, which effectively burst as a result. Rotting began and flies moved in.
My gage is in an impossibly dry, south-facing bed, but you can often control moisture levels while fruits swell.
After winter, mulch the damp soil round the tree to conserve and provide a steady supply of water. This also eliminates weed competition.
Like us, many creatures want the fruit, not least the plum moth’s caterpillars. You might find a small pinkish grub curled round the stone and nestling beside an unappealing little pile of frass.
The plum moth had laid eggs on developing fruit in July, so harvest the plums as soon as they’re ripe and before the caterpillars leave. This hopefully reduces next year’s moth population.
Lift and destroy any rotting and possibly infected fruit and try placing a bird feeder on or near the tree to attract foraging tits. They would deal with overwintering cocoons hidden in cracks in the bark.
Although these tits do sterling work checking for cocoons and aphids, they also appreciate the odd sip of juice straight from the fruit.
You win some, you lose some. But a flock of jays menaces all our fruit here and I even have to build barricades to fend off sweet-toothed badgers.
As ever, good hygiene is essential in the fruit garden as it minimises the risk of fungal disorders, like brown rot.
Remove any brown or shrivelled plums and pick up any that have fallen. You can compost them if they’re covered with a good layer of hot, fresh grass clippings, or use a hotbin. Otherwise bin the waste.
Try to ensure the vegetation round a tree is as low as possible, either by mowing or strimming and clearing.
Any fungal spores on the ground will be exposed to winter frosts. As we all know, plums can be overly generous, cropping more heavily than a branch or stem can handle.
The ideal solution is to prevent the problem by thinning fruit but this is, of course, completely unrealistic for large trees.
Even if you’d been keeping a close eye on a tree and noticed vulnerable branches, they may have been inaccessible, so you’ll have to remove a broken branch, cutting back cleanly and as close to the trunk or branch as possible.
You should always quickly remove any damaged or diseased branches, but you should also carry out any major pruning after fruiting, not over the winter.
Like cherries, apricots and peaches, plums are prone to silver leaf disease, a fungal disorder that finally kills the tree. Winter pruning cuts heal very slowly and this gives the fungal disorder plenty time to enter and infect the tree.
So prune either in spring or if you miss that slot, after harvesting.
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