Beach plums

Here’s a use for beach plum that surprised me. I went to the Blue Point brewery a few days ago and one of the beers they had was beach plum beer.
The third from the left is the beach plum beer. Second from the left is apple.

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Wow. I need to go over there n try those. @danzeb

So, I’ve really enjoyed reading about these beach plums. I hadn’t even heard of them until recently and discovered they are actually a native plant to the east coast (I’m in north-central VA). I’ve been wanting to get a damson plum for jam, but am intrigued now to know if any of you who have beach plums have also had damsons and if so, how the two types of jam would compare? I know I LOVE damson jam. But I’ve never had any other kind of plum jam. The later blooming of the beach plums interests me as we do have late spring frosts, and any kind of toughness re: disease and bugs is welcome in our lower-spray orchard…

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Old wild beach plum growing in sand at beach. About 12 ft across.

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Wild beach plums are in flowering. Most of them are off white like this row which is about 100 ft long.


but some of them are pure white like this one

and very few are like this pink one

most of them don’t have flowers as dense as this one

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Sampling beach plums today. Mostly marble size. One large tree only blueberry size fruit and sour. Some ripe some a week or more before ripe. A variation in sour and astringent taste. One sweet one had an unfortunate bitter after taste. Most had strong flavor. Many had just a light fruit load. Maybe birds or people picking them.
This one plenty fruit:


This one not ripe yet:

This one healthiest with best foliage about 6 ft tall:

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I bought and planted two seedlings from OIKOS, probably back around 1996. Got fruit off of one, for a couple of years… small purple plums, with not a huge amount of flesh surrounding the pit. Quite tart, but nice enough to eat a few as I was mowing… probably would have made a great jelly.
That plant subsequently died, and the other continued blooming and suckering for a number of years, but evidently nothing else growing here would pollenize it, so no fruit. I finally managed to eradicate it, but it took several years to do so.

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So how were they?

I have heard from a friend that there is a local park with a large lake that has some sort of fruit around it. There was a lady picking 5 gallon buckets of it to process in the summer, and I’m wondering if it was these beach plums. I’m going to have to check it out this year. When would I expect these to be blooming? It looks like May from most of the pictures here?

Last year, which was an early year for all flowers, they where in full bloom May 14th at a Long Island beach.

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Probably not beach plums if it’s a lake. They pretty much only grow by the ocean in the wild. Not knowing anything else about the fruit in question, my top guesses would be blueberries followed by American plum.

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American plum sounds very likely. I think they were pretty decent size bushes /trees.

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September 2021 I was sampling some wild Beach Plums. I took two Beach Plum 8 inch cuttings Sept 22 and grafted them onto Santa Rosa plum the next day. I’m surprised that worked and they are now, May 2022, both growing.

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The one with the very dense flowers sure does look interesting! Is it located anywhere near you (and could you even find it again)? Might be worth checking on it in August when fruit starts ripening to see if its fruit matches its blooms… if so it could be worth collecting some scionwood :wink:

I was at the beach today. Flower buds have not opened on the beach plums so I hope to go back in another week so I can mark the better flowering ones.

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My early backyard BP is in almost full bloom as of this morning. Three others are in various states of pre-bloom. I’m an hour west of Philadelphia PA aprox same latitude. I would LOVE to get down to the DE Bay beaches (my list below) to scout this weekend, but I don’t think it’s gonna happen :frowning:

Places to Explore during BLOOM

  1. Big Stone Beach DE
  2. Bennett’s Pier Beach DE
  3. Webb’s Cut Off DE (maybe)
  4. Ted Harvey Conservation Area, DE (southern access road)
  5. Pickering Beach DE
  6. Port Mahon Boat Launch and Road, DE (DRIVE IT IF POSSIBLE!)
  7. Fraland Beach DE (Might be good if the road is good and if there’s parking)
  8. Woodland Beach, DE (GO HERE! GOOD PARKING!)
  9. Higbee Beach, NJ
  10. Sunset Beach, NJ

All I have is a graft on Santo Rosa. Also a Toka grafted. I’m curious if they can pollinate the beach plum that will be flowering for the first time.

Reading back through this old thread, and thought I’d mention that I’ve visited Burbank’s place in Sebastopol ~10 yrs ago. It became a housing development (and land trust), but a good number of his planting are still there. Much of it had to be reclaimed from all of the Himalayan blackberry that took over. I believe Burbank imported it for breeding, and it of course became the scourge of the PNW. Not sure if anyone on this forum lives remotely close, but it might be worth poking around there a bit to see if there might be any remnants of his Prunus maritima plantings. I found the staff there quite open to fruit explorers. We were encouraged to sample what was ripe, including some very unusual Sorbus hybrids that you eat bletted like medlars, but that taste a bit like chocolate pudding (kinda). Probably they have someone on staff too that might be able to field inquiries about still extant varieties.

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My beach plum bloomed today. This is Jersey maratima plum on Saint Julian roots… the same tree I transplanted from Maryland to Pennsylvania when I moved back here 4 years ago. This tree is multi-budded with Jesse’s Purple and Jesse’s Yellow from @JesseS. The bees were working it hard. I took today off from work to do some grafting. The sun came out in the afternoon.

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@Matt_in_Pennsylvania

Looks like your going to be making some jelly or jam!

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