Part of the Ottawa tree services that we provide is dealing with black knot, a type of fungus that affects cherry and plum trees. It creates these ugly growths on the trees that release spores and spread the disease, and sadly there is no cure other than to cut off the affected parts of the tree.
In this case we had a plum tree that was riddled with black knot in the Sandy Hill area of Ottawa. We carefully trimmed the tree back, getting rid of all the branches infected trimming them back to viable unions. The fungus grows invisibly within the tree, and there is a lot more than just the black masses that are visible, so it’s important to be aggressive on the pruning.
We disinfected our saws after every cut. There’s no point in pruning if all we’re doing is spreading the spores directly into freshly cut, vulnerable wounds in the tree.
We also did an overall prune on the tree, removing dead, damaged, and crossing branches.
We made sure to dispose carefully of all the wood that we removed, again making sure to not spread spores around.
Just one year later, the tree had rebounded was doing incredibly well, producing an abundance of plums. It was amazing and wonderful to see the turnaround.
