- Joined
- Jul 12, 2016
- Messages
- 5
- Reaction score
- 0
- Country
Plum tree
- Thread starter JAMES CONLON
- Start date
Prunus are not long-lived trees, 30 to 50 years is typical. The lichen on your bark isn't harmful, just an indication of great age. Yours is right there. It probably has either a lot of deadwood as pictured, which shouldn't be there on yours, or on others has had a lot of the deadwood removed and not entirely replaced by new growth, because the older, poorer-growing branches haven't been removed soon enough. They are small, weak-wooded trees that evolve to either have too much old wood that is higher than the species has the ability to convey sap to grow new wood, or are over-pruned to keep free of deadwood and begin to sucker like crazy. Suckers are ugly and their removal sort of hastens the degeneration process because the renewing process of growing new wood is thwarted. All of this makes for a short-lived tree.
In really good years Prunus (and many other healthy fruit trees) will have a big crop which takes all the tree's energies to ripen, which ripening process carries into autumn and that limits the ability to set buds for the next year. So, very few flowers in that following year. That means it can set a whole passel of buds for the 3rd year and again, very little in the 4th, ad infinitum, back and forth in alternating years.
In really good years Prunus (and many other healthy fruit trees) will have a big crop which takes all the tree's energies to ripen, which ripening process carries into autumn and that limits the ability to set buds for the next year. So, very few flowers in that following year. That means it can set a whole passel of buds for the 3rd year and again, very little in the 4th, ad infinitum, back and forth in alternating years.
- Joined
- Feb 2, 2014
- Messages
- 11,586
- Reaction score
- 5,667
- Location
- La Porte Texas
- Hardiness Zone
- 8b
- Country
Ditto as to all @treeguy has stated. Lichens in and of itself are NOT harmful to trees. The reason you have lichens is that the tree is stressed for some reason, probably as treeguy said, old age. A stressed fruit tree will not bloom or if it does very little. If the tree is not old, and here I disagree somewhat with treeguy, I have never had a plum last more than 20 years, but that may well be my soil and climate. What you can do is to cut out all of the deadwood and make sure that the root flare is exposed. After this is done just feed the tree and when you feed a tree you fertilize out to and slightly beyond the drip line. Where you live I don't know if you can get a product called SuperThrive but if you can treat the tree with it. If in a years time the tree doesn't come back it is probably not going to survive.