Mine is loaded.
Here was the pic taken 2 days ago.
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Some years they set heavy crops and other years nothing here. Mt Royal was as reliable as Castleton when I used to manage it. This is a great year for E plums here, including fake valor, but it still isn’t setting the grape clusters Mt Royal used to. I don’t grow it anymore.
All my E plum except for mirabelles set abundantly this year. Mirabelles set like crazy last year so there is no surprise it sets lightly this year.
Fake Valor set well last year and I was surprised that it sets even more this year. They indeed look like grapes. I can’t thin them enough or in time.
Vision is a great plum that sets heavily every year and it tastes very good, ripens later than most.
I know you mentioned that your Elephant Heart did not set a lot. Mine was like that for the first 3 years but this year it sets so well. I am very happy. I love the plum.
Elephant Heart.
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I wouldn’t worry about the squirrels, you have ;plenty. How long do you have to wait until you pick them! I would make cages for those trees, the fruit is soooo beautiful!!!
When it doesn’t have pitch pockets, Elephant Heart is the reigning queen of J. plums in my opinion. E plums don’t have a member with that distinction, IMO but some embrace Green Gage. I’m glad I don’t rate it so highly because it is a cracker when it rains at the wrong time. The majority of E. plums I eat will be out of the freezer and the main issue is that they have high brix for that.
I harvested both Seneca and Castleton from a site I was pruning yesterday (hedge pruning fricking crab apples as a favor). There were also ripe Red Havens, being a shady site. The fruit was all pristine and most free of rot after receiving only one summer fungicide spray- the site is maybe 15 miles from me but on top of a hill with great air circulation. In the old days, I guess, most orchards were up on the sides of hills… they didn’t have great fungicides to work with. They used the hollows to grow annual vegetable crops to utilize the deeper soil.
Seneca is a beautiful plum but does not bear as reliably as Castleton. I’m not speaking of something set in stone because plums are rather mysterious, both Js and Es, and will perform differently from site to site for inexplicable reasons.
It really helps me in evaluating fruit to be able to see how varieties perform in so many different sites. If only I had a great physical memory, including for tastes, shapes and color patterns I would be an expert at identifying varieties.
You can go on believing your mystery plum is a Mt. Royal, (although I don’t believe MR is quite that round). No matter how certain I feel I make plenty of mistakes.
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Here’s a Starks bros photo. I’m sure there are different strains of Mt. Royal going around though because plums come fairly true to seed. In cold areas where few can be grown, the wild trees may be predominantly Mt. Royal offspring. This photo looks like the Mt. Royal plums I used to manage.
This is Mount Royal from Fedco.
Description : Chance seedling, ripens late summer, bear abundantly, medium-sized, roundish, dark purple, greenish-yellow flesh. Often considered the sweetest of all E plums.
Everything seems to fit. If it walks like a duck……
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Except the description of it being the sweetest euro is absolute BS- prune plums that don’t drop off the tree before reaching full sweetness are all capable of about equal sweetness. However, some get sweet earlier in their development. However, even in that department I don’t find fake Valor exceptional. It only becomes deliciously sweet when it turns to amber, like most E. plums (Autumn Sweet is an exception). And roundish is not round, the modifier means it isn’t exceptionally round, to my mind. Fake Valor is the roundest prune plum I’ve ever seen- by far.
If you want to believe a swan is a duck you will probably make it look like one.
Of course, you could make the same argument of my opinion. Nobody is right or wrong here. If you really want to find out, just graft a piece of Mt. Royal to your fake valor and get back to us when it bears fruit. I’ve already seen both plums for several seasons. I managed 2 big Mt Royal plums for over 20 years and It always ripened at least two weeks after Castleton at the same location… I am currently managing several fake Valors in my nursery and at a couple of other sites. I also grafted it on one of my orchard trees, but it didn’t fruit yet… the Valor graft next to it and grafted at the same time has plenty of fruit. Fake Valor has or had fruit at the other sites and on my nursery trees. It’s almost done and they’ve had ripe fruit for over a week.
Fedco is centered where temps are cold, so later ripening plums probably can’t be ripened to full sweetness there.
What I’m asking you to say is that either of us just might be right. You might be right.
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Moving a plum tree I planted in 2023. Would move it in the fall or spring? Zone 6. Our first frost is expected mid October. Ground won’t freeze much before Thanksgiving.
I move most of my larger, bearing age in the fall and start as soon as trees are nearly dormant, but still have a few small leaves on the tips of shoots. For stone fruit I begin in late Oct her in S. NY. Been doing it with hundreds of trees for the last quarter century. It’s a good idea to mulch them well after transplant although lately winters have been so mild it hasn’t been necessary.
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I moved trees both in the fall and the spring. The last time, I dug my jujube tree up in late Oct (too late to my liking) and replanted it. I did like Alan suggested, mulch well/thickly to protect the roots, just in case we have a very cold winter. It has survived and thrived.
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Alan,
My Fake Valor round (roundish), very similar to Mt Royal in the Fedco catalog.
Also, you mentioned that you could not think of Euro plums that are round/roundish.
I have two, the Fake Valor/Mt. Royal and Pearl
Fake Valor on the left started to ripen now
Pearl ripened 10 days ago.
I don’t know how well @BobVance’s Fake Valor fruits this year.
Mine is prolific.
You and I agree to believe whatever we want to believe about the Fake Valor.
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Do you really believe that you couldn’t be wrong? I know I might be, but not based on anything you’ve shown me.
BTW I didn’t write E. plum, I wrote prune plum. Gages, mirabelles, and damsons are not prune plums and many tend to be very spherical E. plums.
I told you if you really want a clearer answer, get a stick of Mt. Royal and in two years you can send a picture of FV and MR side to side. You will also see if they ripen at the same time.
Until you grow Mt. Royal you really can’t know what it is. The reason I’m less than completely certain is that I didn’t grow them both at the same time and my memory isn’t perfect. But I am almost certain that Mt. Royal did not reach full sweetness until the last week of August here, and that was just the first to ripen. Valor ripens more gradually but there were ripe Valors and ripe Mt. Royals at the same time a week to 10 days later than FV.
And once again, old varieties like Mt. Royal may come in different strains, so FV could be a different strain than what I was sold as Mt. Royal but is one version of it. What’s more, I believe nurseries often tend to mislabel and even mis-identify varieties, especially ones not sold much to commercial growers. I don’t believe nurseries on the east coast sell a lot of a wide range E. plums to commercial growers and they tend to be less careful when selling to home growers.
And mirabelles!
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As a round plum shape? Yup.
My complement of fruit trees consists of:
3 peach
2 plum
3 pear
3 fig
1 sweet cherry
1 nectarine
3 apple
The peach, pear, and plum trees were here when we moved in. No idea of the peach varieties. Plums are grafted with Toka and Shiro. One of the pears is a russeted variety.
I planted all the rest as bare roots and they are all top young to set fruit.
This is the first year in the 8 we’ve lived here that squirrels demolished our ripening fruit. All the peaches and pears gone. For whatever reason, they didn’t go after the plums.
Which I’m grateful about. This is our first real plum harvest - the trees have heavy PC pressure and this year I used surround from petal fall on and repeated after every rain. Almost no loss from PC!
For the peach trees, i ended up pruning them a lot closer to the trunk so the branches dont hang down to where the squirrels can jump up into them. I’ll continue to use baffles around the trunk and add tanglefoot next year.
Unfortunately, our trees are spread out all over the property, so fencing isnt an option.
At least I have plums! Dried 3 pints worth last night. And a neighbor with a bounty of pears shared with us. Lots of jam, pear butter made. Now a load in the dehydrator.
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Those look goid. This year is the plum year for me. Lots of plums both Euro and Japanese.
A sample here.
You should grow Lavina, Nadia and Elephant Heart.
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I think i may try to graft some of those varieties onto the existing trees next year. They look beautiful.
Inca looks very interesting. How is taste and brix?
That one accidentally dropped a week ago so I don’t hink it will taste any good. The rest gave not ripened yet.
I rely on description fromL.E Cooke.
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