i am in zone 5,in central lower michigan. i only have a small,new grove of apple,peach,and pear trees.
lost one pear over the winter,but the rest are doing well. right now,buds are where they should be,very visible,but not swelling too much. silver us starting to show on the peach trees. just wondering what kdl is…
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I don’t use it, a spray to add some temporary freeze protection.
potassium dextrose lactose; Agro-K corporation, Minneapolis, MN
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almost all my stone fruits except contender peaches are in full bloom and they are calling for low of 25 tomorrow night here. Its just sickening. Two years in a row I’ll major if not total damage/ Its enough to make a person want to give up. I’m sure I am not alone.
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Kevin,
If the temp stays at 25, it won’t be bad at a full bloom stage. Let’s just hope it won’t get lower than that.
I root for you.
@mamuang I hope that is true! I was looking at the freeze chart and photos posted above and I got the impression that lot of my stuff was in trouble. Saying my stone fruits were in full bloom was a bit of a simplified summary. My apricots are all at split shuck. But they only had a few blooms this year and I never really expect to get apricots anyway. My Dragon Tongue Pluot is at petal drop, so I’d say all them are a goner and its probably my favorite fruit. Same with my Spring Satin…its my very favorite fruit I grow and its petals are all falling now. a few plums are in petal drop too. And 2 unknown peaches are at petal drop. But aside from all these, most of my other stone fruits and pears are in full bloom.
25 will be much harder on things in petal drop and split shock, right? Oh well. I knew I was in trouble this year when everything broke dormancy about a month earlier that usual!
Kevin,
Have you seen this thread by @JoeReal. It’s about using aspirin spray to protect against freeze.
I even went out and bought a bottle of aspirin for this purpose. It does not hurt to try. You have nothing to lose.
I have heard of beans, not pluots! I will need wood next year! 
I made a mistake because I was thinking of the beans you mentioned. My pluot is called DRAGON TEARS. Its the one you’ve probably heard me talk about. I got it by accident when it was being sent by a grower/supplier to a licensed commercial grower. While trying to track down what it was I got an incredibly helpful employee at the original growing nursery that was able to figure out that the trees delivered to my local retailer had been on the same truck as the patented ones grown specifically for a commercial orchard out west that grows for grocery stores and that somehow they had mixed up 5 dragon tongues with 5 methley plums and I bought one. They are an incredible fruit when I get them, but the problem is that they bloom insanely early…BEFORE MY APRICOTS even. Here is the place my tree was supposed to go, and if you scroll down you can see photo and description of my Dragon Tongue. Also amazing how many other Pluots exist that us backyard people never know about or have a chance to buy!
It was grown for a big commercial grower called Kingsburg. It it is fun seeing how many pluots they actually have licenses to grow. The first photo is mine. Use the arrows to see others they are licensed to grow.
The photo above is my dragon tear pluot. If you want to see all the other pluots they have that you probably never knew about, use the arrow beside the following photo and you can scroll through dozens of them.
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Awesome looking fruits!
This is the weather circumstances that caused me to delay planting plum trees. In my area some years they are wiped completely out and some years they make it. Looks like I might have a few remaining but the next two days the temp are dropping again. I just need to keep reminding myself that I knew the risk up front.
Yeah you guys got major problems with the weather, it is still winter here and everything is sleeping. Everything looks great but it is very early for me yet. I’m going to spray copper next week, to give you an idea.
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I just find it utterly amazing that there are literally dozens of varieties of pluots grown for the retail trade, but when you and I and others here do searches for pluot trees for sale the only ones we ever see are the same 6-9 varieties. You’d think whoever had the rights to all those shown on the web site I linked in my other post would release at least a few more varieties to the backyard market. I bet there would be a lot of sales from folks like us who just want to try one of these other varieties. Some of them, as you saw, are absolutely beautiful. And if they taste as good as my Dragon Tear then they would be worth growing for sure. Also, I don’t see why they couldn’t keep growing them for the grocery market. Oh well…must be some reason I don’t know why there are so many pluots horded by big-retail growers!?
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I only have about five varieties of plums and about five more pluot varieties grafted on limbs and I was hoping to find one or two that bloomed later than the others. All the ones I have had a very short bloom cycle and it was mostly within a week. Looks like the late blooming plum that escapes the cold weather might not exist.
Yes, I would like some of them, but do have enough now to make my own pluots, and I will be this spring. I will be making crosses and just growing some out too. I feel I have enough winners that my breeding stock is rich. I now have my own cultivars of raspberries, black raspberries, and peaches, pluots are next. I can only do it on a small scale, but pleased so far with the brambles. The peaches are too young yet.
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The chart is already listed there… very few people look at the general resources page, maybe it needs to be split up into multiple pages.
Kevin,
You are extremely fortunate to luck up and get Dragon Tear.
Many of us have complained for years about not being able to
purchase any of these amazing varieties. The only consolation
prize, if you want to call it that, is that the inevitable March
freezes would likely prevent most of us from ever seeing any fruit.
This is the third year in a row that March freezes have virtually
wiped out most of my stone fruit. Thank God it doesn’t freeze
during watermelon season. This is one of the reasons I have
planted so many different fig varieties. I KNOW I’ll get figs and
melons.
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I would have thought creating a new pluot would be a lot harder than you make it sound. I know you have to net the blooms you are pollinating to prevent accidental pollination. Then you have to pollinate a plum with an apricot (which apricot blooms will you use?) then plant the seed and grow it out a few years and hope the cross you used creates a tree that makes a good fruit, right? I thought the odds of getting a winning fruit from a seed grown tree would be pretty low? So when you say you are going to create some new pluots this spring, it makes me think I must not understand what is involved in creating one…which I probably don’t. Seems like if it were that easy there would be more of them on the market. IF people can just make their own like that, more people would do it and patent and sell them. So what is the process you’re going to use to make the new pluots this spring? Thanks!
I agree Rayrose - between the freezes, the diseases and the insects stone fruit is losing its appeal somewhat. I am going to plant around 15 peach trees this year but I am going to take a breather (at least slow down) after that to see what I get as my trees mature. Melons on the other hand did really well last year. I have made a bunch of raised boxes to grow them this year - at least if a late freeze gets my melons I can always replant.
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Some of the links say “page doesn’t exist” or something similar. Instead of linking a site with a pdf file info, it would’ve been better to download the file and attach it maybe?
I had saved a favorite to Penn State site with fruit guide. Now when I click on it, it says “buy it for $15”. Last year it was free. But I didn’t save the pdf. Just saved the link. Bad idea.
It is hard to get something really worthwhile, but if both parents already are. Notice how many Dapple this and Dapple That pluots out there? Well because you can’t go wrong. I don’t have to reinvent the wheel, i can start with pluots. Pluot crossed with a pluot is a pluot. Nectarine, plum, peach, apricot, and cherry genes are already in the plum pool, I’ll use them, I have all those genes in my yard now.
Well first all you said is true. Chances of getting something exceptional are rare, and I certainly don’t expect anything worth a patent. As far as what I’m going to use, I’m unsure. Some i will grow out. Since pluots are dependent on cross pollination, it is likely another pluot provided the pollen and all you have to do is grow them out. I just like growing plants. I don’t care about any other aspect, anything else is frosting. I doubt for now I’ll make any intentional crosses next year really. I need to grow out many and see if any crossed would be worth doing. What we have is fairly nice already. I crossed peaches to try for a specific ripening time to fill the gap I have. I crossed raspberries to make an orange berry, mine came out pink. It is orange for a second then turns pink. I’m doing another raspberry cross to try again. And the pink produced fruit only 1 year old, almost all cultivars out there produce fruit the 2nd year. So the pink appears very vigorous and healthy.It is a great feature for breeding, so I will use the pink in future crosses to insert that vigor in future cultivars. Well try to anyway. I always wanted to cross western blackberries with eastern, to try and get that western taste into a hardier blackberry. Those seeds should germinate this spring. I also have a 2nd raspberry with extreme vigor, and hoping it’s a winner. As far as pluots I need to develop goals, I don’t really have much. Still evaluating breeding stock. So far Dapple Dandy made it, it has good flavor, large, the tree is productive, and hardy. Also Nadia has made it into possible breeding stock as it has some excellent features some cherries have like more hardiness than plums and later blooming times. Yet very early ripening, the main thing I’m looking at. We don’t have loads of early plums/pluots, the cherry parentage helps them ripen earlier if you can retain it.
The weeping gene in Weeping Santa Rosa would be useful to make other weeping types of trees with fruit. So that one is in too. Maybe I’ll produce the world’s first weeping pluot tree? Maybe I’ll call it a Drewot? The gene might be recessive and i will have to cross back, we will see. i still though want to develop more goals. I will play around with learning to grow out seeds for now. Also could be used for rootstock if a stinker. Candy Heart is another I would like to play with. Dapple Supreme, Dapple Jack and Fall Fiesta look interesting too. FF has plum, cherry, peach and nectarine in its parentage.
Really after 40 years of growing I need new challenges, so grafting, and breeding.
are just extensions of the hobby, for advanced players. I like to grow hard to grow plants at times, such as variegated plants. Learning how to collect pollen, emasculate flowers, scarify seeds. Last year I started a project to grow out fig seeds and look for common fruiting types, but a frost killed all my seedlings. This year with figs a few of us are trying to clean some virus infected plants up by finding apomictic fig seeds so we can produce disease-free offspring of choice cultivars. It can only be done in a wasp free region and yeah I meet that criteria.
Anyway I’m rambling, sorry, It doesn’t matter the results, the learning on the journey is the prize.
Burbank made hundreds of unusual fruits and plants from white blackberries to spineless fruiting cacti. Nobody told him he needed years of multiple crosses, he just did it.
Burbank’s creations included: Fruits
113 plums and prunes
35 fruiting cacti
16 blackberries
13 Raspberries
11 quinces
11 plumcots
10 cherries
10 strawberries
10 apples
8 peaches
6 chestnuts
5 nectarines
4 grapes
4 pears
3 walnuts
2 figs
1 almond
Russet-Burbank potatoes
Grains, grasses, forage
Nine types
Vegetables
26 types
Ornamentals
91 types
Burbank wrote, or co-wrote, several books on his methods and results, including his eight-volume How Plants Are Trained to Work for Man (1921), Harvest of the Years (with Wilbur Hall, 1927), Partner of Nature (1939), and the 12-volume Luther Burbank: His Methods and Discoveries and Their Practical Application. Burbank also published in 1893 a descriptive catalog of some of his best varieties, entitled called New Creations in Fruits and Flowers’.
Other works include:
The Training of the Human Plant
Some Interesting Failures: The Petunia with the Tobacco Habit, and Others
The Almond and Its Improvement: Can It Be Grown Inside of the Peach?
Four Burbank Plums, and How They were Made: Methods Which Brought Unprecedented Success
About 50 more i won’t list…
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