The Accidental Smallholder Forum
Growing => Fruit => Topic started by: juliem on August 16, 2017, 10:24:12 pm
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That time of year again when I loose the majority of my plums to sawfly.Did keep hens and that helped. Always nervous about biting straight into a plum....does the tell tale bit of wax mean the plum is lost.Picked a few today which looked okay but had that spot of clear wax on them..put them in the freezer......am I wasting my time.
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Might actually be the plum moth instead.Have definetely got the brown spot.Do try and remove and burn all damaged fruit.The tree is in a very inaccessible part of my garden which makes cultivation round the tree difficult.
It's a victoria plum about 30 years old....always covered in plums but never had a decent crop
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I have those problems on my damson too. When it was young we had some wonderful crops, but it's a disaster every year now.
I hope someone knows the answer :tree:
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Cleared the ground a bit round the tree this morning by cutting away at the shrubs in preparation for digging the ground over exposing the moths to birds ? Had a bonfire and burnt all the spoiled plums. Not sure whether I will now be exposing the tree to frost .
We have a 100 year old damson tree a few feet away....never has failed to produce a good crop and never been affected by this moth.This would be a Shropshire damson. Similiarly the apple tree has had a bumper harvest again.They are cookers and with a little planning will keep me going all year.
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A bit late to this but we have been struck by this too. From what I can see it's likely a moth rather than sawfly. There's a couple of things suggested online:
Keeping the tree 'open' will help birds and bats move through to eat up the offenders.
Using pheromone traps that attract the male moths (only) and stick them to the paper.
Removing/burning fallen fruit.
The lifecycle seems to be that the adult moth lays the egg on the plum and it falls to the ground. There on the ground the larvae overwinter before emerging next spring as moths and starting again.
That leads me to believe that having chickens grazing under the trees will help, though I don't see much about it online.
The sticky resin isn't a sign of a rotten plum but something else entirely (I can't remember what just now). I've tried guessing which plums are infected but I can't always tell. One thing that we read, and did find true, was that the infected plums ripen earlier. At the start of the season a lot of the plums we pulled off the tree were infected and a whole load of windfall plums (maybe 1 or 2 in 10), but later in the season and it was very rare to find an infected plum (maybe 1 or 2 in 100).
We've pruned our trees and done a good job of clearing all the windfall plums so we are hoping for a few less worms next year. Need to get the chickens under the trees though.
Dans
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Or geese which really love plums, and keep the grass grazed short around the trees too.
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I agree that it tends to be the first plums that tend to be affected.Eventually I did get a decent crop but this was after I had got fed up with making jam.
So a lot left on the tree to rot. I think those first plums which are infected tend to put you off biting into them.