hi everyone im new here I signed up to see if I could get some help because I couldn’t get any information for my specific problem anywhere else on the web and its not a generic question anyway. I live in CA we moved into this house about 5 years ago and we have a mature plum tree in the back yard I don’t know what kind it is but the first few years we were here it gave a lot of really yummy small to med purple plums this last year however there were hardly any fruit on it and the branches were very sparse with leaves so I deiced that I would very severely prune it to give it new life which I think was my first mistake my second was that I did it in the middle of the horrible California summer. It has 2 large branches that separate from the bottom after my pruning it started giving maybe 10 small shoots from the right branch the left branch did nothing and has done nothing till now and recently the few new branches that were on the right side have dried off and I know that its not from lack of water because we’ve had some heavy rains this last month so now im worried that ive killed the poor tree which I loved and its breaking my heart. I water it regularly once of twice a week and ive kept that up hoping that it would eventually come back but nothing and im giving up hope any help anyone could give me would be greatly appreciated as I said ive gotten nothing so far on the net. Oh and I don’t know if that makes a difference but its planted in a hole about 10 feet among concrete. Thank you
If you added the concrete after you moved in that is liable to be why it went into a decline. Whatever the original couse of difficulty for the tree whacking it back added to its problems. Severe pruning forces a tree or shrub to draw upon energy stored in the remaining stem tissue and roots to make replacement growth for the parts that were lost. It would seem doing this in mid-summer could mean that it had very minimal amounts of stored energy to draw from, as the normal annual cycle would be to manufacture food in the leaves during the summer and store it in the stems and roots over the winter. Taking most of the foliage away during the summer would also of course interfere with storage of energy for the renewal of growth the following spring.
