As the season gets closer to ending (still a good bit of time here near San Francisco), I am thinking through how to manage the severe shot hole (edit: oops!) on my Weeping Santa Rosa plum (smaller issue also on FK pluot). One thing I’ve read is to ensure proper cultural control, and included in that is to ensure leaf litter doesn’t stay around waiting to inoculate future tissue.
Is it ok to pick off large amounts of leaves to prevent this? Let’s say up to half of the leaf area… At what time would this be OK? Leaf fall is probably in December here…
Raking up leaves seems like it’s be a poor way to control it as all of the dried up spore containing material is likely to crumble and stay on the ground, especially where I have wood chip mulch that would make hard to determine what’s what during clean up.
