I don’t know about you but I find that with gardening sometimes you have to admit that no matter how hard you try or what you do, at some point a plant, tree or shrub has reached the end of its life. A good example of this happened a few weeks ago in our orchard and I thought you might be interested to hear how we replaced an ailing plum tree and at the same time discovered why it and all the other fruit trees in the orchard have suffered from disease and poor growth over the years.
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| The orchard the year we moved in |
The oldest Victoria plum tree was beyond saving; it had dead and dying branches, suffered from leaf curl aphids and more terminally had a hole in the trunk which was visited by a woodpecker on a regular basis. We needed a fruit tree to go in its place so visited a local garden centre and on the advice of staff chose Prunus Meteor Korai. It should produce cherries for eating and cooking.
First things first, the destructive bit was to get rid of the old tree. Using loppers and a pruning saw we removed (husband and me) all the dead and dying branches, these were piled up in another part of the garden and left to be shredded in the usual way (see my blog How I Dispose of Wood Garden Waste). This left only the three main larger branches.
T (husband) then dug out an area radiating 2 foot away from the base of the tree. As he dug he used an axe to cut through all the roots.
Eventually all the roots had been freed and we were able to lift the tree out of the hole.
I then dug out the remaining old soil from the hole the tree had been growing in. I couldn’t dig very deep down as I hit the bed rock which was about a spade’s depth under the top soil.
As you can see from the picture below the tree had a very shallow root system which was definitely caused by the thin topsoil. As a result of this, the tree was beset with disease over the years.
Now can the fun part – planting.
with good quality compost bought from a garden centre and .......
shovelled it into the hole.
Next I made a well in the planting hole which I had just filled with fresh compost. In the tree went, I then swivelled the tree around until it was facing the right way. NB. Plants, shrubs and trees have a front and back so when planting you should work out which side of the plant you want to face front. Basically you swivel the plant around in the hole until it looks right to you – the arrangement of the branches could be better on one side than the other.
Having decided on the right position I filled up the gap between the planting hole and the root ball using more of the new compost. I then used my heel to firm down the soil just outside the root ball.
I then gave the tree a jolly good water.
Lastly, I wrote its name on an aluminium label and hung it on one of the branches. I always use good quality metal plant labels as I find the plastic ones become brittle with age or blow away in strong winds.
Now that I know about the issues with growing fruit trees in this garden, in future I will manage the trees slightly differently from your average orchard. Each tree stands in its own mound of earth, this is kept free of grass and weeds, it is fed and mulched and watered in dry weather. I will prune the trees to keep them to a height and spread of no more than 12 feet, this is to limit the size of the crop and the number and weight of the branches. There is only so much jam, chutney and pies I can make before the family gets sick of it. So far this approach has worked with the other trees, for example, the neighbouring Bramley has a lovely thick trunk and only produces a manageable number of apples of good size and quality . As with all the trees there is no sign of diseased or deformed, misshapen fruit. The odd windfall is cut up and left on the bird feeder. Success!
I will post any future developments if and when they occur.
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