Two Plum Trees: That Would Something!

    If you plant an apple tree, you will get apples.  If you plant a plum tree, you won’t get any plums, unless you have a second plum tree somewhere in the vicinity.   That has been a problem for us.  

    See the tree on the left,  that was a plum tree we planted probably 35 years ago (I know it doesn’t look it.)   At the time, we also planted a second plum tree, but it died.  That tree didn’t really prosper.  For more than thirty years, it didn’t even put out a bloom, although somehow it managed to stay alive.   Of course those blooms did start to appear, they never developed into plums, because we no longer had a second plum tree.

    In 2012 we bought two plum trees at Costco and planted them in our garden.  After a couple of years we got some plums from them.  In 2018, we had a bumper crop of plums on one of those trees, so many plums that we didn’t know what to do with them all.  Sadly, the other Costco tree then died, so we were down to two trees, the old original one that never flowered, and the bountiful one, that then no longer produced plums, because there was no second flowering plum tree.

    Then a few years later, that second Costco plum tree also died.  I cut it down, as well as the other dead Costco tree.

    Then as luck would have it, after those two Costco plum trees died and were removed, our original plum tree started putting out a few blooms.  More blooms appeared every year, but since there was no other plum tree on the property, those blooms produced no plums.

    Yesterday I made an amazing discovery.  About eight feet away from the stump of that first Costco tree, I noticed some white blooms along the garden fence, where our clematis vine grows.  It seems to be a plum tree that must have come up from the roots of that first dead Costco plum tree.  I assume I hadn’t noticed this straggly tree that had come up because it hadn’t bloomed, and I just thought it was part of the clematis.

    Anyway, miraculously, it looks like we now have a second plum tree in our yard.  I hope that the bees visit both of them, so some of the blooms are pollinated and produce some plums.  I know it might take a couple of years for the straggly plum to really prosper and put out a lot of blooms that will be more attractive to bees.  

    At any rate, at this point I am very happy and hopeful of this surprising development of having the much needed second plum tree.

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