I recently gave my Dapple Dandy a haircut too. It’s definitely in my top 3 favorite stone fruits.
A few years ago I had extra Dapple Dandys and decided to make a “Plum Rum” by cutting them up and soaking in spiced rum - OMG so delicious!
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If mine puts out good new growth I’ll do another pruning later this summer. It won’t be dormant wood so I guess it would only be useful for bud grafting.
To give you an idea of this young tree’s vigor, I had 6+ feet of growth on two branches from just this spring.
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Have you grown them on Myro?
Here’s my Emerald Drop on Myro in the front yard. It has about 20 fruits on it this year. Last year, it had exactly 2.
Here’s the same variety on Citation in the backyard. It has hundreds!
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For good measure, here’s my Flavor King on Myro. It’s not vigorous but is precocious. It set fruit the next year of planting.
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This behavior is not limited to plums/pluots. My apricot tree has set a ton of fruit only this year, it’s fifth in the ground. Last year, it had only a handful.
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Nice looking trees. I’ve got one apricot on myro. I don’t like the tree. It seems very sensitive to water stress. But it has set flower buds from day one.
On your stone fruit that doesn’t set until year 5, are the trees setting fruit buds and blooming in those early years without fruit? Or is it just growing bare wood without so much as flower buds?
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Flowers were very sparse. I hand pollinated them too but they just wouldn’t turn to fruit all these years.
Maybe they were too vigorous. But my greenhouse stonefruit trees are too vigorous and they flower the second year almost without fail.
That structure looks very dense in the center to me and the center may not get any sunlight.
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I have had 4 plum trees on Myro (one not anymore): Flavor King, Splash, Mirabelle de Nancy and Bavay Green Gage. I also have had a dozen other plums on Citation and St Julian. Myro produces much more vigorous trees (too much vigor for my likes) and all except FK produced sparsely in the fourth/fifth year. FK produced a good crop on the second year.
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The photos show a front view, and you can’t see the inside of the tree.
But yes, they received good fertilization this winter and have grown like rockets; they’re stronger than Hercules:rofl:
Regards
Jose
Thanks Ahmad, your experience is exactly like mine. Only reason I went with grafting my own trees on Myro is because of Crown Gall. Myro caught it too but the tree has been alive for a few years and still fruiting.
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Greetings all: This is Marcus Toole from SE Georgia with a hot humid Hardiness Zone 9a climate. Most of my experience is with chickasaw plum cultivars, hybrids and a few stem canker resistant Asian types such as Methley. (We have very little black knot pressure in my area.) A couple of guys are reporting tentative success with Dappled Dandy; Emerald Drop and Splash in Southern Georgia and adjacent areas in neighboring states. The trees in question are only about 4 or 5 years old, so the success is very tentative. In each case, they started with multi-graph trees, and these were consistently the three that thrived well enough to be productive under our climatic conditions. I’m nearly out of space, and I’m always leary of adding something which might jump-start a disease issue in my orchard, but I think I’m going to give these three strains a go.
Being in SE Georgia, they will have the best shot grafted to Chickasaw (Prunus angustifolia) cultivars. I plan to graft some of each onto Toole’s Heirloom Chickasaw and N.C. McKibben Chickasaw. I already have a source of scion lined up. I only have space to evaluate each strain on both rootstocks for one season. My plan is to keep one tree of each variety on the rootstock on which that variety does best on that first year. Wish me luck as I embark on this experiment.
Note: I grafted Spring Satin plumcot last year to Toole’s Heirloom Chickasaw and Ridgeland Chickasaw and it took wonderfully on both. I’m pretty confident that the pluots will work just as well on the chickasaw cultivars. Most people don’t know about using Chickasaw cultivars for rootstocks in high bacterial stem canker, peach stem borer and peach crown gall pressure areas of the SE USA. Sence someone mentioned Myro and I think another rootstock, I figured that I would mention this other, often overlook rootstock option which solve a lot of root and trunk pest problems in not humid climates with lots of disease pressure. I plan to report back as the experiment progresses. Thanks.
Marcus Toole
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Oh, the only pluot I’ve ever tasted was some Dappled Dandies bought from a supermarket that tasted like they had been picked way too green to ripen properly. I very doubt that our heat and humidity will allow them to hang on trees as long as they do in some climate, but I look forward to the possibility of tasting a tree ripened one.
That sounds super good. I made a syrup out of extras this year and it’s amazing. Dapple Dandy or any dapple is amazing. Large delicious versatile use. I’m totally sold on these. I like Flavor King too. I don’t need any others. Although the late ripening pluots are cool to have fresh plums in September and October.
Out of those pluots you mentioned I think DD is way ahead. It should graft fine on your rootstock. Also these ripen very well on the counter. I can say they work well in cold Michigan. I have grown DD for 13 years now and only one year did it fail to fruit. Pluots need thinning. But DD tends to still produce even when it over produced the year before. Great fruit tree. One of the very best.
Yeah I made syrup this year and they taste more like cherries than plums. I can’t drink it fast enough. I still like tart cherry syrup better but boy these are close to being as good. For fresh eating they are top rate too. Large fruit too. A winner in every category.
I’ve had Dapple Dandy in my orchard since 2014, for me and my climate it has been a total failure. I still maintain a single graft on a very old tree that’s slated for removable next year. During all those years the most it produced (in a single year) was about a half dozen subpar fruits. When not fighting canker off, the tree blooms well but set spotty, the fruits that does set fail to size up and drops. I’ve had four Dave Wilson trees of DD (all on myro 29c) just up and die. The only pluots that does well here (MS) are Flavor King, Emerald Drop and Flavor Grenade. Splash and Geo-Pride lives beautifully but seldom produces anything.
Mine is on citation. May be why? Plus I don’t know of any pluots on that rootstock from DWN. If you can grow flavor King you should easily grow DD. If you used grafts well the scion could be wrong, diseased, or compromised in some way. I think though after four times I would give up. Luckily you appear to be the exception. I have not seen that many bad reports on DD. Here I have grown about 16 different pluots and so far all that took grew well. Currently I grow about nine pluot cultivars. Sometimes I put them on bad branches that died. Or a graft is weak and the scion never really takes off. I don’t count them as failures. As it was my fault. I choose a bad branch or did a shitty graft. Often second or third attempts grow fine.
Another really well adapted pluot for my area is Geo Pride. Although almost all do well Flavor Queen and Flavor Supreme do not do well here. I recently put in an American wild plum and Flavor Queen produced 40 fruits. Not sure if that helped? I still plan to remove. I’ll give it another year. If it produces I’ll keep it. Well it’s too bad it didn’t work for you as I would rate it higher than any others I have tried. Flavor King is close but it produces less fruit, smaller fruit and some do not like the perfume flavor. I myself love it. Makes fantastic syrup. I have found the other pluots and all plums make terrible syrup. I only like DD FK and geo-pride is ok. I also like the late ripening Flavor Finale and even better is Fall Fiesta. .
Interesting, Jaypeedee! My griend in Waycross GA, 9a?, is getting success so far on DD, Golden Drop and Splash, and is getting poor growth and severe brown rot issues with Flavor King and Flavor King and can’t keep Flavor Grenade alive at all.
Are your Geo-Pride and Splash blooming properly for you? I would be interested in buying some Geo-Pride scion from you in January or February. What other plum varieties do you have? And which pluot varieties tend to bloom with which plums if you have noticed?