Beach Plum day is approaching.
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Where are you located. I found some wild ones yesterday on Long Island and none where ripe. There was one in a park that I use to get fruit from until someone cut it down. That one ripend n September.
I am in Virginia near DC, so probably at least a few weeks ahead of you.
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Bring in some fruit from my trees, these samples are from 3 of the nicest…I like the color variations, they have different flavors as well. Some broken branches from the fruit load!
Going in a batch of jam!
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I bought Jersey and Premier from Raintree a few years ago. The plants are pretty big now and flower but I’ve never gotten a single fruit. The blooms seem to miss each other as they bloom right after one another - but Raintree says they pollinate one another 
I could send you some scions to help pollinate if you graft, just remind me in late winter.
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That’s very kind of you. I’ve never tried grafting, but that may be a solution. Raintree offered to send me two new plants, not sure if maybe one of my older ones was an accidental seedling variety (do they even offer seedlings?). I’m going to try to gauge the bloom of the new plants they send next spring, but could be a waste of a lot of time. Thanks I’ll keep you in mind :)
Very kind.
Beach plums grow naturally on salty sand dunes within a few hundred feet of the water. I’m not aware of them growing naturally inland and yet they grow so beautifully in Kansas.
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I was at the beach last week and on my walk saw 25 Beach Plum trees with fruit. There were many more that I did not count. None of them had the density of fruit like the Cornell picture. I saw additional ones with no fruit so they may not fruit every year. The largest tree I saw was 8 ft high and 10 ft wide. I’ll try sampling them when they ripen but last year the birds ate every ripe plum so there were none for me to try. There are many Autumn Olives in the same area but again the birds eat them all so I haven’t sampled any.
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My seedlings are variable in productivity, there are some which bear annually, and other that do not. Also different colors, flavors, growth habit, etc.
I have not sprayed at all this year, and my best bushes are once again loaded with fruit that looks nice and clean. Most of my other plums did not fare so well with our cool wet spring. This points to one of the true values of this plant for me- it is a pretty bomb-proof prunus.
Some of the grafts which I was excited to see bloom this past spring have seemed more pest-susceptible, ie, curc. These were improved cultivars and numbered selections from the mid-atlantic area. Hopefully next year they will do better, if not: adios!
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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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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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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?