I sure wish I knew this 2 years ago. I grafted Satsuma to a lot of other plum trees over the last couple of years. This spring I’ve had to remove several of the new Satsuma grafts as well as 2 scaffolds from my original Satsuma tree because of Black Knot. This is by far the worst infection rate of any of the plum trees I am currently growing.
Even my Euro plums (10 different varieties) only had one occurance of Black Knot that I had to remove this spring. I’m rather surprised as I can’t recall others stating Satsuma was so bad for black knot on the forum before. This tree has not fruited yet, so I sure hope it isn’t a mislabeled Methley. I already had to remove my Methley tree because of all its infection issues.
I grafted Satsuma to my other J plum trees because I heard it was such an excellent eating plum. I’ve got the feeling I’m going to regret this before too long.
I’ve already grafted Howard Miracle and Kagetsu onto my original Satsuma tree and I’ll for sure be grafting others to it to replace limbs I’ve already had to remove because of Black Knot. What a shame because my Satsuma tree was my most nicely shaped open center plum tree of the many plum trees I’m growing.
Strangely, I grafted at least 4 limbs of Satsuma onto a natural dwarf of a seed grown volunteer euro prune plum tree 2 years ago and it has shown no sign of infection. This tree grew up right along the completely shaded side of the fence line where it gets almost no sun, yet it has not shown any sign of Black Knot before. This tree is only about 6 foot tall and probably a dozen or more years old, and the trunk is only about 3" or so in size. This winter I plan to dig up this tree from its shaded location and relocate it to a far sunnier spot. I’m hoping this will promote production once it has far more sun.
I’ve moved 15+ year old dwarf mature pear trees several times without problems before. For anyone that’s done this, are mature plum trees more likely to die than pears if moved from a long established location? I figure I don’t have much to lose in moving it from its current location as with the almost total lack of sun I doubt it will ever fruit where it sprung up.