A. plum as a peach or cherry rootstock?

huh; mustang sounds really good.

Problem is I canā€™t find any info other than from the breeder so you are always left wondering is this marketing vs reality. That said http://www.whiffletreefarmandnursery.ca/catalogue.php has many different trees grafted to it for sale this year.

I have Blackice on Mustang for the last 2 years but too early to tell really.

Bit more info here: Mustang Rootstock

Here is some info on one of the breeders:
http://www.jeffriesnurseries.com/colman.htm

And I found the Canadian Breeders registration
http://www.inspection.gc.ca/english/plaveg/pbrpov/cropreport/pru/app00006054e.shtml

The cross is an interesting one!
Prunus salicina x P. americana x P. pumilla var. besseyi

Could this be a USA source?

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This confuses me . No apricot is mentioned in the parentage but the last link says apricot . Every species listed is considered a plum .

Last link is some other nursery making stuff up as usual. Crosses are Japanese plum, American Plum and Western Sand Cherry per the gov documents. Probably a American plum x Chum (cherry-plum) cross. Why some nursery person decided to add apricot in the title? No idea. Goes to show you need to go to the plant patent/breeder source for real info.

I have about 10 apricot seedlings going. They should be big enough to bud by late summerā€¦so i might put various things on them and see what happens. Another good possibility is pluot. They are very fast growing seedlings and seem to work with plums, cots and from what i can tell so far, peaches. I believe the pluot seedlings iā€™m using are mostly flavor kingā€¦but not positive on that.

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I found this thread after doing some research about some plums that I transplanted today. My wife found them near a barn on someoneā€™s we know property about a mile from here. She asked the owner if he minded if she dug some seedlings up and he said go ahead. So, she came home yesterday with maybe four seedlings, already in bloom.

Only two of them had decent roots on them so, thatā€™s what I planted today. The tallest is about 6ft tall, and the other about 5ft. She said theyā€™re some kind of red plum, and that they used to grow here on this farm many years ago. The fruit starts green but turns red, and can be quite tasty, according to her.

I noticed that they had some nasty long thorn-like protuberances on the branches. So, I googled this and I think we have some American Plum, aka Wild Plum, aka Prunus Americana.

Reading this thread excites me because if there are more of these seedlings to be had, and the fact they are compatible with peaches, Iā€™d like to maybe topwork these seedlings with some cuttings off my peaches in the future.

Right now, Iā€™m just going to let them get used to their new home, just hope theyā€™ll survive the transplant. I did a bit of pruning to them, hope I didnā€™t cut off too much. Iā€™ll post some pics of them in a bit.

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I will be grafting plums soon . I have a row of wild Chickasaw seedlings I will graft will graft Waneta , Shiro and Hollywood to them . I plan to graft close to the ground so I can get the scions to root in time . I want own root trees that hopefully sucker some .

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I know that this is an old thread thatā€™s been resurrected a couple of times, but Iā€™m very interested and would like to continue the discussion. I just picked up 5 prunus americana seedlings and planted them in pots. Iā€™m thinking Iā€™d like to grow them one full year (theyā€™re little 2-3ā€™ feathered seedlings now, very thin diameter) and graft peaches or plums to them next spring. The problem that I have is that Iā€™ve never successfully done any grafting (Iā€™ve made a couple of half-hearted attempts that didnā€™t take. Cleft grafting looks very simple to me and since I donā€™t want the wild plums at all, just the rootstock, thatā€™s what I really had in mind. I figured Iā€™d cut the rootstock 6-10" from the ground and cleft graft a similar sized scion onto it. Will that work? Assuming that the graft takes, should I grow it out in pots for that season and then transplant to the orchard in the fall?

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Any updates on these Dood? I notice a lot in and around my property that are likely candidates for transplant as well.

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We transplanted three of the plums. One of the two in the yard has leafed out nicely, the other, not so much. But, I wasnā€™t expecting much from them, so weā€™ll see how it does next year. It even produced a little plum, but it fell off.

I planted the other one in the pasture, and I think itā€™s still alive, but the leaves got hit pretty bad by J beetles.

BTW, did you get to see the eclipse? Yā€™all were about in the middle of the totality path, right?

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Yes! And it was fantastic!!
Good deal on at least one of your American transplant plums making it. Should be good to go now having survived a solid summer. :+1:

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My peaches have been growing more vigorously than I expected. I didnā€™t keep up with the pruning and had to reshape some of the trees around mid-summer. I was surprised by how much they suckered in response to hard pruning. This appears to be one of the issues with a typical prunus americana seedling. It wants to be a bush. First, most have been sending out multiple trunks. Second, they donā€™t focus growth at the new terminal bud after pruning. They send out stronger shoots farther down the trunk/branch. I wonder if the ones used by nurseries as rootstock are cloned versions that grow more like trees?

I did get some peaches off a couple trees this year, which is as precocious as it gets. They were just little 30" x 3/8" seedlings last spring when I grafted them. The following year I have fruit! The fruit was a little below average in size, but very high sugar and flavor. Of course is was a very high leaf/fruit ratio.

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I grafted a Veteran peach and an Indian Free peach onto Prunus Americana rootstock this spring. They were less than pencil width diameter seedlings and I had them in small rootbags all summer. I just planted both outside recently, weā€™ll see how they do.

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How are they doing? I know itā€™s early but did they do well through the fall?

I didnā€™t get as much growth, because of drought and field-digging American plum rootstock, but grafts of both Indian Free and Peregrine took. Indian Free died late summer but I think it was drought, not a compatibility issue.

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They look ok right now. The wood is a good shade of red and the buds look healthy and fuzzy. Of course, itā€™s still early. Hereā€™s a picture of the ones left in my garage. The outside ones look about the same, maybe Iā€™ll try to take a pic of them tomorrow.

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They do look good.

I wanted to grow some wild plums, I was looking at various species and choose Dunbars Plum. I decided to grow from seed. Anyway I was reading that it grows as a single trunk in most cases. Sounds like it does sucker, but not as bad as some wild plums (itā€™s a natural hybrid) Fruit can be red, blue or yellowā€¦ Prunus x dunbari which doesnā€™t tell us much? Anyway i have a few extra seeds and was thinking maybe try them as rootstock? I was not thinking about that when I purchased them.

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My peaches grafted on p americana are set to bloom really nicely, these were grafted two years ago. I transplanted a couple out of the nursery row, and left a couple in place. They have grown strongly as well. So it seems like there may be some precosity when using p a as an understock. I tried doing this same combo last year and got a very low take rate, weather conditions were not right-too cool. Another grower set up a warm callus box at 87F for this purposeā€¦

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I think Iā€™ve seen some anecdotal evidence that PA (prunus americana) can provide some additional hardiness to peaches for colder climates.

The first snow that sticks to the ground is usually around the middle of November here. Last year it stayed autumn-like into December and then suddenly plunged into negative single digits overnight. I was a little worried that some of the trees werenā€™t hardened off enough for this event. The rest of winter was typical, with lows never reaching -10ĀŗF. When a heatwave was predicted for middle of February, I went to check bud status on my main peach trees (Redhaven and Contender on peach roots). About 1/3 of the buds were shriveled up. Another 1/3 were missing completely. The remaining 1/3 looked OK from the outside, but they never bloomed in the spring. On the other hand, the young Redhaven and Contender trees on PA roots set a first crop of a couple dozen fruit.

Iā€™m not sure what happened here but it seems the trees on PA roots were better prepared for the temperature plunge, assuming that was the damaging event. Hopefully it is a consistent behavior and not a one-time thing based on unusual circumstances.

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