Replacing an Asian plum with European plums
While I was cleaning
up the forest garden, I decided to bite the bullet and rip out the Methley plum
I've been babying for the last four-and-a-half years.
Several people have sung the praises of their European plum trees
in the last year, telling me how much the trees produced with
little care, and I figured I'd obviously just chosen the wrong
species by going for an Asian plum.
Since the two new
European plums I installed last winter --- Seneca
and Imperial Epineuse --- have already grown considerably more than the Methley
ever did, I suspect my gut reaction was right and I should have
been more hard-hearted sooner. In fact, I was able to
literally rip the Methley plum out of the ground bare-handed, a
sure sign that it was lingering, not growing, in our soil.
Now I just need to
wait another three to five years for these better plum varieties
to produce. It's a bit easier to be patient now that other
fruit trees on our homestead are starting to bear...but not much.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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