Re: Pea type pods on my plum tree?????!

[Trinity]

Can anyone shed any light on a little mystery? At the bottom of m garden are two large plum trees. They never have much fruit, but wha they do have tastes great. I already know that they have canker (lot of gooey sap leaking from the branches), but this year I have notice that although there are some small plums beggining to form, most of th branches seem to be growing pods (very much like a pea pod) whic contain what look like peas! Does anyone know what this might be

- Trinit

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[Steve]

Tell me this, are those pea pods forming in place of a fruit or are they deformed and enlarged leaves? I have a plum which sometimes produces big pods in place of some of the fruit. I never had them have pea-like structures inside though. If you have enlarged fruit, do a web search for "plum pockets" and see if you find anything familiar. If you have deformed leaves, I would guess it is some sort of gall forming insect. In that case, you should find a little worm developing inside the structures that look like peas. Let us know.

Steve

Tr> Can anyone shed any light on a little mystery? At the bottom of my

[Rez]

We had something odd when broccoli and lima beans were planted next to one another. Apparently they cross-fertilized (I would have thought they'd be genetically too far apart??). The lima beans produced a whole bunch of leafy-looking things instead of proper pods -- yes, they did grow from the flowers that would normally make pods. Very strange. Only after the broccoli were pretty much done for the year did the limas start making real bean pods.

And the broccoli made lots of clumps of little leaves instead of proper heads, then would have blooming parts loosely mixed in with that. (It was supposed to be head-type broccoli, not the fluffy kind.)

~REZ~

[Steve]

I can assure you that they are. It was a coincidence.

Steve

[The Watcher]

Here's a respons Loki posted elsewhere in the newsgroup:

"Plum pockets is another fungal disease that can infect the Japanese-type plums. Infected trees will produce abnormally large misshapened, bladder-like fruit with thick, spongy flesh. The centre of the infected fruit is hollow due to failure of the young seed to develop. The best way to describe the fruit is that it looks like large pea pods. Infections also occur in April as the buds swell and bud scales separate. A spring fungicide application prior to bud swell will control this disease. The fungicide thiram 75WP @

6.75 kg/ha is recommended for commercial plantings with Japanese plum varieties. Lime sulfur can also be used for those persons that have only a few plum trees."

From:

hope this helps. Sorry I lost the post to reply to.

[Rez]

So I'd thought, but to look at 'em you'da swore they were trying to have each other's babies :)

What was that weird and useless cross someone once did, radish and cabbage? I vaguely recall it results in a plant that's all bolt and no nut (grows a seed head but w/o any useful edible parts).

~REZ~

[Steve]

I didn't hear about that one. Radish and cabbage are certainly close enough to be crossed. Radish seed pods are very edible and I have heard they are great in stir fry recipes. Perhaps they were trying for bigger, better seed pods but it didn't work out.

Suppose the world worked differently than it does and you could actually cross broccoli and lima beans. The cross wouldn't change the appearance of either parent plant. Pollen of one would fertilize the other and nothing would look different until the resulting seeds were grown and the new hybrid would appear. (I just have to wonder what that plant would look like!)

Steve

[Pen]

Mmmm... limocolli. Other varieties to try are onea (onion x pea) and spinots (spinach x carrots). Didn't think you had room for corn? Try cotato (corn x potato) -- keep in mind it's a heavy feeder. :D

[Rez]

It was one of those "Because we can" crosses that biologists make. One of my gradeschool texts (back in the 1960s) used it as sortof an example of how NOT to produce new foodstuffs -- the result has neither usefuls roots nor tops, it's just scruffy seedy stuff that greatly resembles an ordinary weed.

So I would expect, unless this was the result of trying to grow seeds anyway without proper fertilization, having mistaken the neighbouring pollen for the real thing :) I know plants can get strange-looking in various states of haploid vs diploid vs ... etc. What the lima beans grew instead of pods didn't look like any pod I've ever seen. I should have taken pictures!!

Or maybe it just had one of those spastic years like grass has -- ever seen that, where suddely all the lawn grass has weird hairy fluffy seed heads instead of normal seed heads? I haven't seen that happen since 1974. Trash bamboo does the same thing -- blooms worldwide only once every decade or so (last seen ca. 1992).

~REZ~