Waterlogged plants issue stunting growth in Melbourne Mulgrave

[doboman]

Hi all. 

Hope anyone can tell me After last year's winter rain I had a water log issue where my lemon, olive & other plants next to the fence were standing. 

I sorted the issue with Agi pipe last year & in the hot summer we had the plants start to put out lots of buds but they have been the same size for the last 3 months. 

Do you think they are dead or are they stressed out and stop growing? 

Kind regards

[MitchellMc]

Welcome to the Bunnings Workshop community @doboman. It's brilliant to have you join us, and many thanks for your question about plant health.

To assist our members with diagnosing what's going on here, could you please identify the plants in your images for us? In your last two images, are these plants budding from locations where you have previously trimmed branches? If you've already removed branches from these areas, then you can finger prune this new growth to stop branches from re-growing there.

I'll call in a couple of our experienced horticulturalists @Noelle and @Adam_W, as given these plants are all exhibiting the same multi bud clusters, I'm a bit suspicious of this possibly being a disease like Witches'-broom. This disease manifests as clusters of weak dwarfed shoots arising from the same point. However, I don't believe it's commonly found on citruses and olives.

Mitchell

[doboman]

Hi Mitchell, 

Thanks for the quick response. 

Its apple tree, Orange, Olive & Lemon. They are not coming from where I pruned. I did not prune the Orange plant. 

It seems like the growth just stopped after last winter. 

1. I pruned both my apple tree, Olive & lemon at the start of winter. ( they were full of leaves )

2. Then heavy rain, waterlogged issue 

3. After aggie pipe installed, end of winter. 

4. no new leaves came ( as per normal ) in spring but suddenly lots of clusters of buds came on all the trees. Mostly on the trunk.

5. until now they seem to have got a little bit big but no improvements with buds sprouting out. 

Olive and apple tree is 10 years + old other are new plants that replaced the dead plants from the water issue 

I suspect they got stressed and fighting back to survive now but need to find if anyone has seen this before. 

We also asked if my neighbor was using any chemicals. They don't. 

Kind regards

doboman

[Noelle]

Hi @doboman 

This type of clumped bud development is often symptomatic of plants responding to stress of some sort, in addition to also being a symptom of disease. I have also seen similar growth when weedicide spray drift has been blown on the wind on to trees. It is not normal growth at all.

Your trees have been waterlogged which means their roots were very wet for a period of time, so I would suspect this is the cause.

Mitchell has suggested rubbing off the clumps of buds (finger pruning). I would add to this that in the coming winter, you prune all the trees reasonably hard, to encourage them to produce healthy, normal buds next spring.

Then it is just a case of wait and see. Hopefully the trees will go back to producing normal growth.

[doboman]

I shall do the finger pruning and a hard prune this winter. 

Many thanks for your guidence.