Note that this was an exceptionally good year for plums in Statesboro, GA. As beautiful as Drag Queen is when it blooms, the unusually cool winter we had demonstrated that won’t ever get enough chilling hours to bloom properly here. I can count on 500 hours, and I received about 650 last winter. It still bloomed in spits and spats. It makes a soft sweet plum similar to other chickasaw cultivars. It’s not as peachy as its Gulfrie parent, but it still was moving in that chickasaw flavor direction. You would be in a much better climate for it than I am. Chickaw plums should do fine in Maryland, especially if you are near sea level. Their roots only go down about six inches, so as long as the top foot of soil isn’t soaked, they should work on a chickasaw root.
Toole’s Heirloom produced a bumper crop this year for the first time in years. We have become too warm for it to bloom properly most years. It needs 600 chilling hours or more to be productive. They are Hawaiian Puch flavored Juce bombs when fully ripe. But if you let it overcrop, the plums will be tasteless. It likes to overcrop. Fruit thinning will be a must in a slightly cooler climate with a good pollenizer around.
Sonny’s Yellow made its biggest crop ever. If you have a good pollinizer for it, it requires vigorous fruit thinning. Guthrie may be a little better tasting as far as yellow fruited chickasaws go, but Gurthrie is a heck of a lot more reliably productive and appears to be a lot more disease resistant. This and Ms. Bessie are the only two cultivars which we know for sure are cross fertile with some other Chickasaw cultivars and chickasaw X Asian plum hybrids. Sonny’s Yellow is cross fertile with Ms Bessie and Flea Market.
I removed Flea Market because the plums are hit or miss. The plums which ripen first are tasteless with the late ripening ones being super good. The issue may be that the tree was getting too much shade. Anyway, I removed it. I’m pretty sure its a hybrid and it may very well have really been the hybrid cultivar known as Bruce.
I have cut all the N.C. McKibben branches out of my original N.C. McKibben. That tree just has the Robusto and Excesior branches I grafted into it. N.C. McKibbem doesn’t make particularly tasty plums, and the brown rot real bad. It makes fabulous rootstock, and that’s its best and highest use in my view.
Ridgeland is still my favorite plum in the flavor department. The tree made a huge crop. It’s another one where you have to keep on top of thinning fruit in part because it sets a lot of fruit but also because the plums are so big. It’s very early blooming and require an early blooming chickasaw plum for pollination. It may bloom to early blooming to escape late frosts in your climate, but if you are close to the coast or close to the tidewater areas around DC all the water near you may tap down spring temperature swings to make it work for you, at least most years. The tree kind of wants to stay small for me.
I removed Guthrie because the leaf scald (disease) got so bad on it, that it stopped producing and was just a source of pathogen for the other plums. The plums have the peachiest flavor of all the cultivars. They are smaller than the plums made by most of the other cultivars, but they were truly delicious. It might work really well for you. I don’t think I had a great pollinizer for it. I know for a fact that Sonny’s Yellow doesn’t work, but it seems to pollinize Sonny’s Yellow.
Odom, makes the biggest plums of any of the Chickasaw strains I’ve grown so far. They also ripened the latest, July here. However, it was never productive and the plums were often quite tasteless. When there aren’t very many plums and they are still tasteless, that’s a bad sign that the tree isn’t ever going to produce great plums.
I plan to add at least branch of two chickasaw strains somewhere this year. I found a yellow one I’m calling Georgia Nectar. The plums are super huge and have a flavor profile which makes me think that it is an accidental hybrid. But the tree definately looks like a chickasaw cultivar. The tree has a lot of plums on it this year. I don’t know what it would do after a more normal winter temperature wise. The plums are big, canary yellow, egg shaped, much more fleshy in texture than is typical in chickasaw cultivars, and has almost an honoedew melon flavore in my view. The plums are about the side of “jumbo” chicken eggs. It will take a few years of evaluation, but this plum may replace Sonny’s Yellow as the best yellow plum for my climate. For one thing we have to see how well it sets fruit after a warm winter.
We just found a new red plum. The plums are so big that it could in theory be a Bruce, but I think this tree may actually be too old to be a Bruce. Bruce was released by Texas A & M in 1972. This tree is pushing 40 ft tall and about 2 ft in diameter at breast height. There is a very good chance that its pushing a hundred years old. I’ve only seen pictures of the fruit. I plan to go see the tree in person this week. Based on photos I’ve seen, I don’t think it’s grafted, but I’m not at all confident that I would be able to tell on a plum tree that big and old. Based on the photos the plums appear to be about the size of commercial plums or Odom. According to the owners of the property, the plums ripen too early and have a wonderful peachy flavor. Peachy flavor definitely implies a chickasaw strain, and I have never once heard of the flavor of Odom or Bruce being described as peachy. (Odom tastes like super dilute sugar water to me.) If I have ever had a Bruce, it was Fea Market. I have Asian types and hybrid plums I can describe, but these are the ones I have or have had direct experience with. Thanks.
