The pics were taken yesterday.
Coe’s Golden Drop is ripening. I’ve had several so far. Some had brix as high as 31 while the lowest brix was still at 25. Overall, a late season, very sweet, delicious E plum.
Middleburg is even later than CGD. The undamaged ones have not ripened yet. It is very productive and the fruit is almost as large as CGD.
Damsons not any good? Stories are sung about Damsons, and tears shed over wiped out old groves.
@lordkiwi → Well, I’m a convert now. Too bad I let mine get such bad form. Rabbits girdled it hard, then several shoots grew right above the graft union and I just let them go for a few years. This spring I tried to hack it to and open vase shape. It looks like a worn out, upside down wisk broom
Some years they get OK when fully ripe, but they are very high tannin and the singing must have been about tarts.
Hmmm. I had my first harvest of a damson plum at the end of September on a small tree, somewhere in the neighborhood of 10lbs. While tart, it is also quite sweet – intense is the perfect description. I could eat them all in three days of undisciplined plum gluttony, but am going to make the best plum jam imaginable this week instead. I’ll get a brix reading before I start cooking.
Damson make the best jam, right up there with Mirabelles and Bavays. 
Hubby bought it on line from a company called Prism Pak ( prismpak.com).
He said there are more on line sites that sell it now. You could look at amazon.
He bought with the material called microperforated, 160 holes/psi. The style we bought is called cello bread bags, 6"x28".
There are many sizes depending on what you want to do with it.
The size we have, I cut each bag into 3 sections, making 3 bags ( using staples) that fit peaches well even large ones
@PlumHill, @alan, @scottfsmith, @BobVance, et al,
Could you tell me what caused E. plum to shrivel on the stem ends!?
Several had this issue when they were hanging on the trees, not even fully ripened.b others did not.
They are on their way to becoming prunes. Very high sugar helps prevent them from rotting before dehydrating, but in CA it used to be standard to let the sun make the prunes that were harvested from the trees already dried. I love the taste of a partially dehydrated E.plum. Brix through the roof and a completely different taste experience from either a fully hydrated plum or a prune.
I get a fair amount of that, its one of the downsides of some Euro plum varieties. If you pick before that happens they are often not ripe. Under the skin it can be brown as it is turning into a prune as Alan mentions. It still tastes great!
I bet they are very sweet and good with all that wrinkles.
Tony
Yes, they were quite firm ( and not ripe) before stem shriveled. Some Coe’s ripened wellwith out shrivelling. Same as Castleton.
Middleburg needs to shrivel first. Otherwise, they are firm and tart. I still have a few on the tree this late.
Yes, they are very sweet. Glad the brown flesh is edible. Last night, one of Coe’s measured at 31.5 brix. Super sweet.
Hello, we see this when there is alot of rain, my theory is the rain washes the waxy coating on the fruit which reduces dehyrdation. If the fruit are ripe they usually crack, but if unripe they get this. We see this on the Japanese as well as euro fruit. We don’t get the heat a lot of you do, but do get a lot of rain. One year the cambridge gages had this real bad with the whole fruit looking shriveled, but they were delicious and very green. I took them to the market to give out as a “ugly can be good” demo, one guy tasted one and bought the whole box.
Eric
Wow, that is an accomplishment I don’t believe I’ve ever duplicated. That’s great.
Thank you for your response. That’s interesting. We had a lot of rain in the spring until mid summer. For a stretch, it rained every 5-7 days.
This is my first year having E plums and noticed this, I will keep an eye out for correlation between a lot of rain and an amount of shriveled plums. I have not seen it in J plums yet.
@alan, I had another shriveled Coe’s today. Brix was 30. In fact, several of Coe’s were between 29-31. The 31.5 yesterday was the highest, so far. It must be the variety. @scottfsmith has said for a few years now that it was a very sweet/good plum. I think planting it in full sun is also helpful.
Alan,
I ate one Coe’s today where brix went over 32. My cheapo refractometer maxes out at 32. This Coe’s went over the max. My favorite E plum.
I am salivating.
Photos of Coe’s!
Matt,
I posted several pics of Coe’s. Please scroll up a few posts and you’ll see them.
The yellow ones were Coe’s. The purple ones were Middleburg.
I don’t have a lot of experience with Euro plums in my own orchard. I fruited Stanley last year for the first time (on a 10+ year old tree - think I had pollination issues early on). I was so disappointed, I tore out the tree to make way for raspberries I now want in that area of the orchard.
This year I fruited three Euros for the first time: a nice crop of small damson plums on a small tree - they are a fantastic sweet-tart delight; fifteen-20 pieces of what I thought was Mirabelle de Metz, collected at a normally varietal accurate CRFG scion exchange four or five years ago - likely a particularly astringent and mushy fleshed damson cultivar I’ll graft over next year; three fruits of M. de Nancy grafted onto the not M. de Metz tree three years ago - boringly sweet, but at least not balls of tannin.
I’ve got several other varieties grafted and growing, but am likely at least two years away from sampling any of them. After reading this thread, I’ll be on the hunt for two or three of the most celebrated here.
