Candy Heart Pluerry

My greenhouse is usually two wks ahead of DWN chart for Fresno. My candy Heart aren’t as dark as yours yet.

When does the chart say?

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That is really nice looking fruit. I should have ordered one.

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7/28-8/23

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Mine changed color last month but have a ways to go. They are are as big (rather small) as Sweet Treat Pluerries. How are big are yours?

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Mine are about 2 inches. If you look back in this thread to Aug 13th 2016, that is when I picked my first fruit. I let it get fully ripe almost soft. It does have a long hang time, it took a good tug to pick it. That is a good thing. For me this is a very nice fruit, but you be the judge when you try it out. I don’t want to over hype anything.

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Candy Heart might not works well in Seattle. Too wet for them. We’ll find out in the next few years.
Its leaves looks better when the weather warming up.

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Mine is doing well in spite of getting early and late afternoon shade from the neighbors’ very large black pepper tree.
That tree at least lets some filtered sunlight through. I have read that plum trees will tolerate partial shade.

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Beautiful fruit, it’s shame it has been in Nadia’s shadow the whole time. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was actually better. Looking forward to your taste reports.

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It does not have to meet the same criteria as Nadia, nobody is asking if it tastes like cherry, which is a good thing since it has so little cherry in it.

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I haven’t done an exact measurement, but my Candy Heart’s are 30-50% larger than my Sweet Treats. Could be at least partially because I have a small fruit set on CH and a massive fruit set on ST.

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So I tried one CH yesterday. It tasted fully ripe. Reminds me very much of Splash pluot both interior color and the taste. Splash isn’t a favorite. It’s plenty sweet but lacks character of flavor. CH could be it’s twin only smaller.

I’ve got a lot of fruit so more later but that’s my first impression.

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What is its ripening date in comparison to Splash?

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I don’t have Splash any more. It’s not nearly as good as Geo Pride for me. Splash is ripe around this time so similar maybe earlier than Candy Heart.

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Picked my first Candy Heart yesterday. Some bird damage probably helped it ripen up a bit faster than others. Seems at least a couple more weeks to fully ripen but I loved the flavor. So far this year, the Pluerries are winning the household taste competition. The birds/squirrels are rapidly diminishing the Flavor Grenade/King population, so there might not be much more competition this year.

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Candy Heart lives up to its name. The less sweeter of the two that I ate measured 23 brix. I bet the other one was close to 30 brix! But it’s just sweet, very little flavor. I’m not sure I like it as much as FS, FK or even Burgundy Plum!

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Oh and it wasn’t even fully ripe. Hard as a rock yet so sweet!

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I tried a couple so far, though not quite ripe but almost, they have a watermelon-cherry flavor to me. It is not an intense flavor but a very pleasing one. The Sugar Twist pluerries that I tried are rather bland, Nadia has a better flavor and is more intense and fizzy. Sweet Treat has too much of a perfume like taste for me to like. Candy Heart, to me, is the best of the pluerries. I hope that it does not get water logged like some of the others when fully ripe. I am looking forward to the next two events scheduled at Andy’s Orchard in Morgan Hill. I hope that you are able make it to one of them.

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I got that too but the sweetness mostly obliterated it!

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Nice. I had trouble putting together exactly what I thought they tasted like, but the Candy Heart I had did have multiple flavors going though it. Sweet Treat was definitely all sweet (which we liked a lot), but at least the CH I had definitely had a lot more complexity. Will be interesting to find out in the next few years how much the flavor varies by the degree of ripeness.

One of the best parts of Sweet Treat for me is they kept a lot of firmness as they went fully ripe; hopefully CH will do the same (and seems to so far). We’ve had a Santa Rosa plum for many years (before I really picked up this hobby several years ago) and they are generally either really tart and hard or soft and sweeter. Nice that the newer Zaigers have less of that issue.

I looked again at Sugar Twist since we liked the other Pluerries so much. I was initially scared off by the chill hours but the bigger issue is probably the ripening time. Late May to early June can be tough for me since we can get a lot of overcast days around then. I have Apricots during that time and they tend to be pretty bland.

The tree I have has 65+ fruit on it! Some will be eaten, given away, dried, and the rest will be made into bottled Pluerry sauce/jam, some with and most without added sugar.

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