I am going to graft Adara onto wild plums and next year graft sweet cherry onto them. I have a wild plum thicket on my property.
If you have the dormant scions of both you can pregraft Adara to cherry, let them dark callous a couple weeks in a warm, moist environment, then graft the joint scions to plum, all in one year!
Dennis
Kent, Wa
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Recently I noticed an effect of Adara interstems that I found very interesting. Several years ago I topworked two mature sweet cheery trees with Adara to convert them to plum varieties. One of my variety’s was Beauty. At the same time I grafted Beauty on several native P americanna trees. This year I noticed the is a huge difference in size and taste of the Beauty fruits on the latter versus the relatively small Beauty plums on Adara interstems.
I would be curious to know what other members may be experiencing with use of Adara. The ones grafted directly without interstems are much more juicier and sweeter that those on Adara interstems.
Pic of Beauty plums from Adara
Pic of Beauty plums on P americanna
Anyone else have similar experiences?
Dennis
Kent, Wa
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It’s not really a fair comparison since ‘Adara’ isn’t being used as the rootstock, but only as an interstem. The fact that the actual rootstock is cherry certainly has to be a factor.
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I got to taste Adara fruit for the first time this year. I’ll let the wildlife have them 
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This has very little to do with adara, aside from it being related to cerasifera, but my plum “Blue Ribbon” grafted to peach produces fruits 2 to 3 times the size of the ones grafted to Marianna which are about the same size as hollywood on marianna.
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Wow, my Hollywood aren’t ripe yet!
Has anyone grafted Adara to American Plum? Any reason to think that will work? I have a few scions to play around with and want to graft one somewhere to grow out as a resource.
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@Eme I grafted some Adara last year on americans for eventual use as interstem. All grafted well.
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Are you saying you grafted Adara onto peach and then cherry on the adaras? Thx
I haven’t tried grafting ‘Adara’ yet, but when I got my scions I just planted them. I don’t remember how many I got, but two of them rooted really well and have grown strongly.
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I grafted to American last year. Future interstem.
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Question- how many Adara buds should you leave on the interstem? Just 1 in case the scion on top doesn’t take?
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I do not know for certain, but I believe @Jose-Albacete uses about a 6 inches or so interstem to give him room and make compatibility work? Hopefully he’ll chime in. I know he’s posted about it at least once somewhere in this large thread:
https://growingfruit.org/t/ranking-of-varieties-of-cherries-only-high-quality-varieties/33702
Either way, yea, I recommend having at least a bud on the adara scion as backup. I find it takes quite easily on bark grafts so that way it should a near guarantee that you can keep the adara at least.
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I’m thinking I only half properly thought through something- I wanted to graft cherries to K1 to dwarf them amongst other reasons. I used adara interstem. They seem to have worked with all parts growing. But, it’s occurring to me that Adara is a full sized plum, so i should have vigorous cherries?
I read K1 has a Cherry parent, but couldn’t find any evidence of anyone grafting cherry to it. Both had multiple shoots on them that I’m trying to root and have sent out multiple shoots since grafting and potting, so I can try again next year directly to the K1.
The adara interstem would be controlled by the rootstock sending up nutrients. Because the K1 is dwarfing, the adara interstem being full sized plum would have no effect on the cherry scion in terms of its size.
Interesting. That would be great as that was the goal! I was just thinking about how in somewhat of a reverse situation people use B9 as an interstem on M111 to dwarf apples, so by that logic, my cherries should not be dwarfed.
If either plant below scion is dwarfing then the scion will be dwarfed itself. If both interstem and rootstock are dwarfing then it will be ultra-dwarf.
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