Plum Tree Help!

[King Biscuit Time]

Hello Urbanites!

I have an allotment, upon which I have inherited two plum trees. One I think is Victoria (greenish/yellow skinned ovoid fruit that blushes a bit red upon ripening), and the other gives smaller rounder purple-skinned fruit with orangey-yellow flesh.

The purple fruit is great. I had a good crop last summer, and this summer I think the late frost got at the blossom, and I got a tiny crop - but still delicious.

The Victoria I think is infected with with plum moth. During ripening, each plum gets a little crystal forming on it (presumably where juicy has dripped out the maggot hole) and ultimately a little maggot inside. Last year I tried to gather all the fruit and binned it. But it still came back this year.

I'm pretty certain this is a lost cause, and I think I'm going to take the tree down next year.

So - what variety should I plant in it's place? If I knew what the other one was, I would happily take another, particularly as the moths seem to totally leave it alone.

- should I wait and give it a year for the moth larvae to die off before I re-plant?

 

[ringo]

Doesn't look like a problem easily sorted
Plum moth/RHS Gardening

 

[kalidarkone]

Gardeners question time?

 

[Epona]

I am no expert on anything to do with growing fruit trees (or anything for that matter), but I do remember when I was a kid we were moved by the council into a house with a big garden with plum trees at the bottom of the garden - they all had this dripping thing going on with the fruit, and the trees were cut down - very sad - but sounds like what you are experiencing.

I don't know whether there is a treatment for it, my parents decided to (pretty much) nuke the site from orbit (only with a saw rather than nukes, and from the ground rather than orbiting around the planet... but I get far too few opportunities to use that phrase)