On dapple dandy is was not just me. Everybody picked DD as the best. I let it hang forever, it hung forever. Nobody was more surprised than me. I now understand why they developed three more in the dapple series.
I’m at my cottage away from my garden working on the floor. I never finished it last year. I foraged a few paw paws, and wow are they good! They are certainly very unique fruits. Good ripe and over ripe. About three people are on the island, very stress relieving being here in solitude I saw one person today for about a minute. He was harvesting paw paws from the wild tree too!
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You are right fruitnut - it will not do much for fertilizing it. I mainly have hard clay soil so it will work well as an amendment - 3 inches of this manure (soil?) will not hurt my garden. My father has a small - medium size John Deere so I could use it to till or disc into the ground soil. For this manure it will run me $350 for 15 tons delivered. I have no idea if that is a good price. I have plenty of spots in my yard (5 acres) that I can easily fill in with 15 tons of compost plus use it on my garden. I bought this mainly to see the quality and the price seemed right ($20 for a scoop from a John Deere Tractor). Supposedly per the farmer 1 scoop = 1200 pounds. . The manure I buy at Lowes or Home Depot runs $2.50 to $3.00 for 40 lbs generic to $5 plus for Black Kow 50 lbs bags. Bulk fill dirt, compost and manure is hard to find in my area. Without driving 1 1/2 hours my options are pretty limited.
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I thought your cottage didn’t have power? Are you running a generator? I imagine it’ll be getting cold there this weekend.
Do you notice any apricot flavor in your DD or FK? What about any tartness? I understand FK doesn’t have a lot of tart to it? I’d like the ones I get to have some tang to them, and not all sweetness.
Same question to you @Jwsemo, and about your FK, FG and Geo Pride. I checked out GP, it looks like a good candidate.
Thanks.
I had a chance to try my Indian free peach jam. It retained a nice strawberry red color. It does not taste like peaches to me. It is more like apple sauce. Has an apple like taste, like a tart red applesauce. Good stuff and very different wonder if I could make a peach butter? This is not really jam but preserves. It has a very similar consistency to applesauce. These peaches are so melting it’s like sauce not preserves.
No apricot in any of them. Pluots to me are just exceptional plums. Some better than others. I can’t stress enough how good king is, I still remember the first time I ate one, it was wow. Just remember that in our climate pluots get brown rot very easy, and if you have humidity like I do here, I don’t think they can be grown without a good spray regiment. Two summers ago we had so much rain in august, it literally rained every other day and I lost most of my flavor king to rot. Three trees worth, that’s how much I think of king.
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I should have mentioned spring satin plumcot. I would highly recommend it. Very disease free tree for me, very productive and as long as you let them fully ripen, they look ripe long before they really are, it is a excellent and early fruit. For a plum/plumcot it is very easy to grow. If I ever got tired of taking care of pluots I would keep spring satin, because it’s so easy and good. In fact you may consider it instead of flavor supreme, which I think for most people is not productive.
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While it’s hard to compare price from such different locations, $350 for 15T is pretty pricey for here. Most farms/ranches locally are all too happy to give away their manure. Many will load your truck or trailer for free, a few charge $10 to use their front loader. I realize that some of that price is likely transport, but still must be “real good sh*t”.
To me DD is better than most Japanese plums but not as good as Grenade, King, or Supreme. It’s definitely not as good as Emerald Beaut plum which I believe to be on par with the best Pluots.
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I have been doing lots of cleanup around the garden and removing unwanted blackberries in preparation for spring planting of fruit trees and I am seeing lots of grubs. Can I use grub x in my garden? They are even in my strawberry patch, can I use it there as well?
Peaches make a good butter -the flavor concentrates wonderfully
Yeah geo pride is often given good reviews. Sugar is more a function of location. All are capible of high sugar but not here. If you harvest when firm it’s fairly balanced.
What irks me is a bunch of new pluots are around but most are commercial only. Although I’m happy with what I got. Only looking to add grafts at this point. All mysteries have multiple cultivars now anybody want to trade scion this winter contact me.
I have power at the cottage. My only heat is a wood stove. Works well, it’s toasty in here this morning. I’m going home as I need to go to the dentist and Mail off eBay stuff. I’ll be back Thursday. I’m almost done. I need three or four days of work to finish up. I may start on the roof or may wait till next spring. The boat runs for another 20 days and I will be done till April.
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I’m going to try this next year, the flavor and texture seem perfect for it. I have to research it a bit too. I never made it before.
Agree with that plus it’s the common pluot sold in local stores but it does way out produce my Flavor Supreme. I’m keeping mine as a pollinator plus grafting others onto it.
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Here are the pictures of the apples from the orchard. The rows were not always labeled clearly so sometimes I have to guess.
The best tasting apple for me was Braeburn. It tasted like the apples should taste: juicy, crunchy, intensively sweet and sour with the good balance. The store bought Breaburns never impressed me much.
The next apple is I believe is Empire. It also was balanced sweet and sour apple, a little less intense than Breaburn, good, but a notch below Braeburn.
Blushing Golden looked very much like Golden delicious. Sometimes it had nice blush on the cheek. The taste is similar to Golden delicious, but it was definitely more acidic, sometimes quite acidic if the apple was less ripe.
This apple I believe is Fuji. It is pink in color. It is lightly sweet and extremely juicy, it feels like you are drinking apple and not chewing. When I first tasted it in the orchard I said WOW, but when I tasted it again at home I was not so impressed, it seemed too bland. But it is a good differently tasting apple. The majority apples on the tree had bug damage. I believe that they cracked after the rain (very juicy) and then bugs moved in.
The last apple I believe is Wiretap. Maybe it was past it’s prime, but it was softer and subacid and not so good as the apples above.
Also tasted Jonathan and Shizuka, but they were done for the season, so l did not take any with me.
Jonathans were almost black, soft and acidic. Shizuka were very large with orange blush, softer, sweet with some acid.
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I think Rob (@warmwxrules) has a few pluots and could give you some thoughts too.
A plum that rivals a pluot in flavor even in my northern locale is Superior. It was bred by U of MN. It has a very rich flavor that tastes like pluot to me. I forgot what Brix it was for me this year, but I suspect I may have it written down.
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Toxic yes; however young leaves can be rendered edible by boiling and dumping the water at least three times. And my first hand experience is that they are delicious.
Sounds like how you process poke weed greens. We sure got enough of that stuff around here. Pretty black berries on them, but not safe to eat. My bro-in-law says he’s eaten the greens before and likes them. Think I’ll pass on them, tho.
I never heard of people eating 'mater greens, they certainly have an ‘interesting’ smell. My wife loves the smell of them, I’m a bit ambivalent toward them. Don’t know if I’d be up for eating the greens.
It’s funny the deer will eat tater and mater greens, but not even touch peppers or their greens. Tobacco is also a nightshade and I don’t think folks around here have an issue with deer messing with them.
Thanks, I’d like to hear his takes on them. Do you grow any of them? I see that you’re in zone 5, so don’t know if they grow well in Iowa. But, if Rob could, I’d think y’all could.
That looks really cool!