Thoughts on a Dying Tree

The week-long flooding is over… plants and weeds have showed up… shrubs are brown drying in the sun – rotting… even the taro plants didn’t survive the waist-deep water. The avocado seedlings that I’ve replanted from the bag didn’t make it as well.

During the rounds I made I noticed one Jackfruit tree dying. It’s about my height now after a year of its replanting. I looked around for the other jackfruit trees in the lot and all are well except for this one. This one is the biggest and the tallest of them and yet this is the one who may not make it anymore. Its leaves are half way brown and bit pale green for some- not fully wilted I said. I wonder if this one’s going to recover… some wild vines are have managed to wrap themselves around this one and amazingly survived the flood knowing they got soaked with it… Well got to unburden this one so I carefully removed every single bit of the vines… still thought that this tree looks ugly at its state… I have to gamble on this one I thought, so I started cutting off the branches saving the two major ones. That way all the leaves are gone and this tree is down to its trunk and two major branches half the original length cut.

I was asking if I have over-done it because I have is a barely living stick… I have done it with some other fruit trees like the guava and mango trees, and they all survived. I’m not sure though with this one… I haven’t done it on a jackfruit tree before… then something caught my eye. The branches are bleeding – white sap is covering the cuts. I smiled maybe this one will make it.

Sometimes we also have to push some fruit trees to their limits… maybe I just needed to force this jackfruit tree to recover. First off by making it stop brooding over its drying leaves and worn out branches and broken twigs. Then without any, it’ll be forced to grow new ones sooner - else it’ll starve. Then recovery would be faster with the new shoots…

posted first from my Facebook notes last August 10, 2011 at 4:27pm