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.
1 Like
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!?
2 Likes
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.
1 Like
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.
1 Like
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.
1 Like
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…
3 Likes
That’s a great chart. Thanks Auburn. John S PDX OR
Wow Drew…that almost looked like one of MY posts! haha. But I understand what you are saying now. It would be nice to be the next Luther Burbank but it seems like a tall order.
I’;ve got some really great wild paw paws in my area and have always thought it would be interesting and fun to cross some from some of the different wild patches I know of in my area and try to create a great paw paw, but it just seems like the odds are so much against me. Plus, paw paws are such incredibly slow growers that it seems like it would be even harder to cross and evaluate fruit from them in any sort of reasonable time period. I often think of Neal Peterson’s paw paw efforts and how amazing it is that he was able to create and evaluate so many varieties over his lifetime when one considers it often takes paw paws as many as 7-8 years to first fruit. As humans, we just don’t have ALL that many 7 year periods in our adult life. At least plums and peaches usually fruit in 3-4 years. Good luck with creating those new pluots.
Can any one let me know if this was the sign of freeze damage plums? These Beauty plums went through 31F twice, a week apart, in May during bloom. Most J plums except for Beauty and Shiro, had their most of their flower buds killed.
As Beauty is ripening, I’ve noticed that each fruit has a dark spot/area often on the side facing sunlight. It is hard to believe it’s caused by sunscald as this did not happen the two previous years.
When I cut open the fruit, the dark spot was damaged inside, too. The pale area in the middle of the page. The cut piece on the right was from a good section of the fruit for comparison.
Any of you could tell me what’s the cause?
@scottfsmith, @alan, @thecityman, @clarkinks, @Olpea
2 Likes
Tippy, it looks somewhat similar to my apricots (below). They’re not quite ripe yet. The defect often starts out as a small red ring or several, (probably wouldn’t be very visible on a red fruit), then the soft sunken brown area spreads out from there as the fruit gets closer to ripe. Also, like you said, only on the sunny side of the fruit. I wondered if it had something to do with one of my sprays interacting with sunlight? I’ve never seen this before.
Yours could be chemical damage but I don’t think mine is. I only sprayed Surround, Spinosad and Indar combo three times.
This Beauty plum was grafted on a Shiro tree and the tree has several other plums on it. So far, only Beauty has this issue.
On each fruit, the damage area is only one spot. It is not sunken. It is hardened. The flesh inside of the area was hardened and off color. It appears as if flesh in that area was”dead”. That’s why I wonder if it could possibly be freeze damage.
3 Likes
Interesting. I sure would like to know why.
1 Like
Only a few that do not sustain such damage. Most do. I pick about 2 dozens of Beauty today. Only one is damage-free.
2 Likes
Tippy,
Has it been unusually hot during ripening lately? I get some peaches which do that during hot ripening times. The double red varieties can do that in really hot years. I don’t recall the plums doing that, so I can’t say for sure what is causing it.
1 Like