Subject: How to protect Plums from destruction (again)

From: [email-masked] (Filip M Gieszczykiewicz)
Date: 29 Mar 1995 12:57:21 GMT

Greetings. We have a 7 year old Plum tree (purchased from "Stanley")
which we have a problem with: every year we get a HUGE amount of
flowers which progress to small fruit - which then ALL fall off
before maturity. It seems to be an insect of some sort. The other
trees in our garden are a Peach and a second Plum (different
variety).

The first symtom is brown spots on the fruit which quickly leads
to an infestation by a insects (worms) and they all fall off. In
all the 7 seasons, we had only one year were we got MAYBE 1% of
the fruit to ripeness. We're to the point of cutting the sucker
down and planting a sunflower :-)

We tried "general PhosphoOrganic" or something like that.. and it
didn't work. We're rather stick to organic stuff since that's the
idea... We've heard of some people using diluted Nicotine (yup :-)
instead of other syntheric killers.

I'm located in eastern PA (Pittsburgh). Just for comparision, we've
had 4 VERY successful seasons from our two Sour Cherries which are
on the side of our house. The branches were almost touching the
ground. We got to most of the fruit before the local bug population
had a chance to settle in for the kill :-)

I checked the Texes Site for Plum and Peach entries and none of the
deseases look familiar... I was wondering if anyone out there knows
of a particular product (or book on care of Plums) that may help
us. It would be a shame to cut down a perfectly [otherwise] healthy
tree... which is just blooming as I type this [sniff] :-)

Thanks for all of your help!

Take care.
-- 
+-->Filip "I'll buy a vowel" Gieszczykiewicz | E-mail: [email-masked]
| http://www.paranoia.com/~filipg | Sci.Electronics, RC, Misc FAQs + MORE!
| Enjoy your job, work within the law, make lots of money : Choose any two.
| Making money with CS and spending it on robotics, life & friends. !NOT(!PC)