Winter Damage

Forty some years ago when we purchased this farm, we were told that the plum trees in the garden were sickly and it would be smart to get some new ones growing before the older trees were consumed from their plight. The trunks of the trees were slowly eroding away while what was left of the top would continue to produce fruit so we tried to hold onto them as long as we could.

There were several varieties that were affected and three trees were most noticeably suffering. The first one we lost was an Italian Prune with dark skin and sweet meat. The tree didn’t survive a spring storm just after it had unfurled leaves for the year. One was a Brooks Prune. The fruit that grew on this tree were huge, one plum is about all a single palm could hold and they were thin skinned with a wonderful flavor. We lost that tree about five years ago when its spindly trunk finally snapped off.

Then there was the tree we lost during this last spate of winter snow. This tree produced small sized, pink skinned fruit that were later than the rest of the prunes in the garden. Over the years we had removed most of the upper branches since the dwindling trunk could not hold much weight. It was down to only a couple viable branches yet continued to produce each year. The tree was not very pretty anymore and hadn’t been for a good many years.

We noticed this final sick tree had perished while the snow was melting, the trunk has simply given up and snapped off.

I would say that is still a pretty good track record for those trees that had been called out as declining to be able to hang on and produce for another 40 years. We have transplanted some new plum trees over the years but have not have good survival odds on the newer varieties so we are back to searching for a couple of special trees to replace those that have been lost.