Hello, I am hoping someone can help me, I have a fruit tree which I’ve had for about 6/7 years in my garden, which doesn’t fruit atall- it doesn’t even blossom! My neighbour brought one from the same place and the same time as I did and they are just over the other side of the fence from one another, yet his is always full of fruit and ours has never produced a single plum! His leaves are larger and more round and ours has two different types of leaves! Some larger round ones like his underneath, yet all the ones on top are pointier and smaller and a bit darker in colour. ( the photo attached shows what the ones underneath look like which are the same as our neighbours tree, and the smaller ones on top!)
Could be a number of things. Perhaps there is a nutrient deficiency causing the tree not to bloom. Perhaps its not the same variety as your neighbors and just hasnt come into bearing age yet. Soil conditions could be competely different, even a few feet could be different if you have fill or if they do. Its actually not easy to figure out why, sometimes it easier to figure out if you are giving the tree every reason to fruit and its not.
How are you fertilizing or not fertilizing? Is your neighbor irrigating and you are not? Mulch layers or competing weeds? How are the trees pruned? Lots of things could be causing issues.
If it were mine, id hit it with low nitrogen, high phosphorus, high potassium fertilizer in the spring time and again in the summer, and see what happens. P and K are in demand in fruit bearing trees.
Based on your description, it is possible that the rootstock overgrew the scion and took over that tree, and the scion only remains on the bottom but is shaded out by the rootstock. I’m almost certain that the larger leaf is a Euro plum, but the smaller one is something else. Most plum rootstocks would actually produce some fruit (although typically not as desirable as the named variety that is grafted on top of it), so I wonder what’s your tree’s rootstock actually is.
I like Stan’s dive into this. But I will also mention that some plums do take about that long to come into bearing. Can you stand to give it another year or two and see if it starts to behave itself?
I planted a root-sucker prune-plum and I think it took nine years to start any meaningful fruiting, and a scion from that same plum did the same after I grafted it to Nanking cherry rootstock. Worth the wait.
