I've tried to find answers both on paper and online but am afraid I am still stuck. I'm in at the deep end a bit with gardening having just moved into a house with a garden 6 months ago, it's a steep learning curve but great fun. For my son's thanksgiving 12 months ago his godparents bought a victoria plum. As we hadn't yet moved house to one with a garden they kept it at their house in it's garden centre pot. This february we transplanted it into our garden. I cut out about 12" of turf around the desired spot and filled the hole with peat free compost and bone meal mixture. Around the trunk I put weed supressent sheeting and bark chippings and kept it well watered. This year we have seen about 6" of growth on branches and got lots of blossom, however the tree has only produced a couple of dozen tiny leaves which have now seemed to die off. I hope I've not killed it. Should I feed water or prune it to revive it? Please help before his godparents come to visit and notice the bare twigs in the garden alongside the neighbours foliage covered specimins. Thanks Andy
Has expericenced an unidentified adversity that has probably killed it. If it hadn't been around there awhile, come out of a pot I would first suggest that it didn't survive the barerooting and storage process between the grower's field and your planting of it. If you buy a replacement or do other planting in future: http://www.puyallup.wsu.edu/~Linda Chalker-Scott/Fact Sheets/Planting fact sheet.pdf
If you want a prognosis of the trees condition you may want to post some photos of it and include at least one photo of the entire tree and one of the trunk where the probable graft is. As far as backfill for a new planting, unless you are dealing with a soil with some known problems it is better for the tree for us place the same soil that came out of the hole back in the hole with no added soil or nutrient amendments. Most areas do not have to be as concerned with some of the issues we have here with our soils, so it is generally recommended to place the dug out native soil back into the hole upon planting. You can try to answer a couple of questions for me. When the leaves emerged, how soon was it that they shriveled up and dropped off the tree? Were the leaves able to expand in size before they fell or did the leaves start to emerge and then they shut down? Did the leaves emerge, look okay for a few days and then turn allover yellow in color or partly yellow with some black colored specks in the leaves, then have the outer edges of leaves curl inwards or curl under and then the entire leaf shrivels up and then falls off the tree several days later? What I would want to know is what the branches look like after the leaves dropped off the tree to know if this tree has suffered some temporary dieback and has a chance to live depending on how much live wood there is left or perhaps see and determine that this tree has already passed on. I realize this is not an enviable position for you to be in. You can ask a nursery professional or better yet a certified arborist to come take a look at the tree and learn what options you have then but at this point in time the preliminary prognosis for this tree is not good. It could very well be that you did not do anything wrong, that even a missed timed fungicide spray might not have prevented this condition from happening. Sometimes all we can do is suppress a disease as we never really do cure or prevent certain diseases from possibly killing our trees over time. Your tree may have had one of the more destructive and virulent diseases that young Plum trees just are not developed enough yet to ward off the effects of it once the pathogen invades. Or the pathogen was in the plant already when the tree was purchased and did not show itself until the tree becomes stressed. Even a heavy flowering can cause stress to a young tree or the abundance of blooms was due to stress to the tree from the previous year. Jim
Thanks for your thoughts. I forgot to mention also that we had a couple of late frosts here this year, I don't think there were any after the blossom came out but I couldn't swear to that. I'll try and get out this evening after work to look at the condition of the leaves and if I can manage convincing my camera to focus where I want it to maybe even post some photos. For now I have hopefully included the photos I took yesterday which show a general condition but are a little hampered by the auto focus of our digital camera being more interested in the lawn than the tree. Thanks again for your advice - hopefully we don't have to go cap in hand to our sons Godparents and confess to arborocide but it doesn't look too promising I admit. Andy
I am glad to see you have provided photos. It is just that I am in the access challenged location to be able to open any of the thumbnails to see the much larger sized photos. Give me a day or two to get back in a more conducive location and then I’ll take a look and try to see what is going on. Jim
it looks dead to me......wheres the bark mulch you talked about (all i see is big tufts of grass)........the other advise on planting is very good (better to use nothing than that peat free stuff)..i could argue the case for and against amending soil till the cows come home, my personal opinion would be asses each site on an individual basis.....anyway i digress, victoria plum is best trained against a wall or strong fence with wires, they have brittle branches and with the weight of fruit easy break.........i say start again, buy a good healthy specimen, check the whole plant up and down, lift up the pot to see if roots are coming out the bottom (even ask a member of staff at the nursery or garden centre to take it out of its pot). good luck with the replacement.
Oscar, You're right you can't see the bark mulch, unfortunately the only times I have been able to get my hands on a mower in the last few weeks it has been pouring with rain, couple that with the bone meal I put down when planting the tree and i suddenly have quite a meadow growing around the base of the tree. I assure you there is bark mulch there though. Hopefully the weather will hold off for this weekend and I can atleast get the lawn sorted. Andy
lol, you do have healthy grass there ;) tell the god parents it must have picked up a fungus, from what you say you tried your best...........from my experience the tree was going to fail before you even planted it. (maybe not, im just trying to make you feel better) i have an idea, next time have a ceremonial planting and get the god parents to plant it ;))
If you want to try an experiment and see if you can save the tree, cut it way back allover to as much live wood as you can. Start over with just a half sized trunk if need be. You might get lucky if this tree is not too far gone now but the photos do not give a good indication of the amount of live wood left. As soon as I saw this tree go into decline I would have done a pruning hatchet job on it to force it to put on new root growth in a last ditch effort to try to save it. Then if you decide to go ahead and severely prune this tree, then right afterwards give this tree an allover dormant spray, preferably with Copper sulfate. I believe this tree was showing signs of the disease last year but one thing we should not do is leave Fruit Trees in a container for any real length of time. Yes, nurseries will pot up bare root plants as they are easier for them to deal with than bare root trees but we can hurt some of them a lot when we do not go right ahead and plant them as a bare root tree right into the ground. It was not your planting technique that may have done this tree in, it was diseased from the start. A missed fungicide spray along with some late season stress the year previous can cause these trees to die out rather easily when the internal disease takes over. It is unusual here to see Plums any more flower, leaf out and then shut down but it does happen in other areas. Jim
Thanks for your words of advice and encouragement Jim, I'll pop out this afternoon and give the tree a thorough pruning and a good spray to give it a fighting chance and then see what happens from there. Thanks for your time. Andy
If there is a chance to save this tree, go for it. After you use a Copper based fungicide on this tree, you may want to look for an Agricultural grade systemic like Ridomil to use later once you get some new growth. What you need after you prune this tree way back and give it a good dousing from a fungicide spray is to have warmer temperatures and have plenty of sunlight. Tell the rain to go somewhere else. I've seen some of these trees look like they were dead and then were able to snap out of their doldrum stage later with some work on our part. There is no guarantee but we can at least try to save the tree. If you need any further help let me know. Jim
That late frost was a critical point to bring up. Looks like it got frosted. Are you in a frost pocket (low-lying area that collects stagnant air)? Certain magnolias that happened to be at a vulnerable stage of development when it got cold this year also were spoiled, although most did not lose all new growth. A bacterial infection could produce a similar appearance.
