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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