When to prune plum trees?
- Botanical name
- Prunus domestica
- Family
- Rosaceae
Plum trees are pruned from April to August. They are planted from October to March. They are harvested from July to September.
Plum trees are woody perennials. The edible part is the fruit.
Whether a plum crops on its own or needs a pollinator depends on the variety. That is checked at purchase.
A young plum is cut in spring, as the buds open, and a grown tree in summer. The window is long precisely because of that difference. In autumn and winter a plum is left alone.
Lime goes on the ground only when an analysis shows it is too acid, and that is done before planting.
Plum trees through the year
- pruning
- planting
- harvest
In short
Growing conditions
Are plum trees toxic to cats and dogs?
Yes. Toxic to cats and dogs, toxic parts: stems, leaves and seeds.
Pests and diseases
Listed here is every problem for which the sources name this plant as a host. The problems are not listed in order of how common they are.
- Signs
- On the trunk and branches there are sunken, dead patches of bark, oozing sticky gum in spring. The leaves carry small holes, as if the leaf had been shot through. The branch above a canker dies. Many a tree shows only leaf and shoot symptoms and never gets a canker on the trunk.
- Prevention
- The bacterium enters through wounds and through the leaf scars at leaf fall, so stone fruit is pruned in summer, when the tissue resists best, and never in winter. The same timing also protects against silver leaf.
- What to do
- For the home garden there is no product against this disease. What is left is cutting: take the cankered parts back to healthy wood, disinfect the tools as you go and remove the prunings from the garden.
- Signs
- A brown rot spreading across the fruit, with light brown cushions of spores on it, often in concentric rings. The fruit drops or stays on the branch as a dried mummy.
- Prevention
- The fungus overwinters in mummified fruit and in cankered wounds in the bark, so collect and remove every rotten and mummified fruit and cut out affected twigs. The infection enters through a wound, so a net against birds takes away the main door. In a cluster it passes from one fruit to the fruit it touches.
- What to do
- For the home garden there are no fungicides against brown rot. What is left is picking off and removing the mummies as they appear and choosing less susceptible varieties.
- Signs
- The plant dies suddenly, often in mid season and without any decline beforehand. Peel the bark at ground level and under it there is a white or cream sheet of fungal tissue, thin as the skin of a mushroom. In the soil there are black or brown strands like bootlaces. In late summer and autumn tufts of honey brown mushrooms with a whitish ring on the stalk appear by the stumps or over dead roots.
- Prevention
- The fungus spreads through the soil with its strands, from a few centimetres to a good hand's width below the surface, and infects the roots of a living plant when it touches them. So do not leave stumps and dead roots in the ground. No plant is completely resistant, but privet, lilac, viburnum, weigela, forsythia, butterfly bush, rhododendron, thuja and walnut are particularly susceptible.
- What to do
- There are no products. The only thing that works is digging out and removing every infected root and stump, which takes away the food without which the strands in the soil do not grow. A vertical barrier of rubber or thick plastic sheet, buried about half a metre deep and standing a few centimetres above ground, stops the spread into an unaffected part of the garden.
- Signs
- The foliage on one branch takes on a silver sheen and the branch then dies. Cut across, the dead branch has an irregular dark stain in the middle that does not follow the rings. On old dead branches bracket fungi grow later, with a whitish woolly upper side and a purple brown underside. A silver sheen without the dark stain in the wood is not this disease but the result of drought or cold.
- Prevention
- The spores are active from September to May and enter through wounds, above all through pruning cuts. Remove dead wood before fruiting bodies grow on it. Prune in summer, when there are no spores.
- What to do
- Cut the affected branch off as soon as you can, well below the point where the dark stain in the wood ends. Disinfect the tools as you go and remove the cuttings at once, because fruiting bodies go on developing on branches left lying about. Do not paint the wounds as a matter of routine, but do it where the disease keeps coming back.
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Related plants
The plants below are in the same botanical family (Rosaceae).
Sources about the plant: ASPCA Toxic and Non-Toxic Plants, Clemson Cooperative Extension, GBIF Backbone Taxonomy, Iowa State University Extension, NC State Extension Plant Toolbox, Royal Horticultural Society, University of Maryland Extension, Virginia Cooperative Extension, Wikidata. Checked between 14 and 25 August 2026. The problem descriptions also draw on: EPPO Global Database.