I’m growing it in NY and it is showing great resistance to bacterial spot, a huge problem with many pluots here. It has given me good crops this year and two seasons back, which given weather patterns here is about as good as any Japanese plum. For all practical purposes it is a Santa Rosa type J. plum with no traces of apricot… as usual for the Zaiger creations. I mean the lack of cot part of the sentence. Many Zaiger pluots more closely resemble Elephant Heart. The difference between more conventional plums to my palate is pluots get sweeter while still firm and often sweeter, period.
What is exciting about Flavor Gem beyond disease resistance is its lateness. Mine are still about a week away from full ripeness and it’s mid-Sept. I will post photos when I harvest the lion’s share of the crop. They look like yours, but I will be shocked it they get to the brix height. It just cannot happen here with J. plums in my experience. However, if it gets above 16 they are delicious. I don’t need plums that taste like wet dates- although it would be a nice addition.
What are your average annual chill hours? Additionally id like to ask you how much do you spray for disease or insects in spain? A short overview of your spray schedule would interest me.
OK, so we’ve had a great couple of weeks of ripening weather, a week in the mid 70’s and now a few days in the low 80’s F. with nights in the high 40s to low 50’s. It’s been essentially dry for the last two weeks although we got maybe a half inch one night and lots of dew every other one. The soil is still quite moist, even though I’ve been letting the weeds get high under my bearing trees.
I harvested about 25 Flavor Gem plums (umm…pluots) from my small tree today as they were just starting to soften up. I tested the brix in two of them, one was soft-ripe and came in at 16.5 brix- the firmer one was 16.
That’s as sweet as my J’s get here- I guess partially because they are so wet. My more syrupy E plums can get as high as 24 brix.
I’ve had Flavor Grenade pluots get sweeter than this, but at my site they are extremely difficult to grow because of yellow jackets.
Flavor Gem is fine but not my favorite J. plum (plluot supposedly) so far. The tree is on citation, and that may be reducing the quality of the fruit because it doesn’t have the vigor here to supply quite the leaf cover I want. I get better quality Grenades on Myro for this reason, so I will have to illegally graft a shoot onto a plum with that rootstock if I want to give Flavor Gem a fair trial. It was only available on Citation.
In my conditions the flavor isn’t all that interesting, but I’m sure less jaded palates will say it is fricking great.
It isn’t like more sugar would make it more desirable for me, although if it got into the '20’s it would create a very unusual taste for J. plums here and I might like it for its originality, if only in sweetness.
After harvesting the Gems I went to my Ruby Queen to pick what was ready and there was a single good sized yellow plum I’d grafted to the tree- I’d knocked off about a dozen of them when I threw a net over the tree to keep the plums from Downy woodpeckers. The graft was essentially a branch I used as the frame.
I thought I’d grafted Elephant Hearts on the tree so I was curious what this yellow plum was and when I bit into it, the answer became obvious, it must be Emerald Beauty… so good- and my first taste of it. If I need a net next year I will take the time to build a frame if it’s necessary to spare that crop. I will also be grafting it to at least one more tree as well as some nursery trees. .
No more than one point higher than the Flavor Gems, but I much prefer it. It is now a top fruit if I can make it productive, which is somewhat doubtful. My original tree died and the grafts haven’t been especially vigorous, although I got some good new wood this year.
Obviously NY is not Spain and I’m sure the same varieties taste much different there. The extremely high brix reading makes that much more obvious.
I got a Dapple Dandy and Flavor Supreme here and they also have Flavor Gem. You’d probably have to write them through chat to find out whether they ship to Italy.
Tana and @Rudolf , be careful , as fare as I understood Rudolf ask for a RELIABLE source , that nursery is not a reliable source at all based on my experience, I bought about 3 years ago and the Flavor Supreme is not a truly Flavor Supreme and the Flavor Queen is not a truly Flavor Queen, 2 of 3 pluots were fake, I informed them and claimed and the answer was that probably the nursery mislabeled ….
Then I only got just a cheeky answer, no refund , no replace trees ….
The fruit that those trees gave me was not interesting to me either, even one of them would say that it is the worst plum I have ever had.
In Italy you have what I understand as a reliable nursery ( Ing……) or at least in case of having any problem I am sure that Italian nursery won’t give to you a cheeky answer ….They are serious and even perhaps they are close to your house,
from time to time they have more pluot varieties, right now only 1
I have not ordered from them directly, but since they are Czech (that eshop is a Slovak branch) our local nurseries stock their plants on a regular basis. No issues so far, except for aronia hybrid Brilliant, not being a Brilliant (dark fruit, overall plant indistinguishable from Nero) and persistently mislabeled. But the only tree I’ve bought from them is a Jiro persimmon, so no idea about pluots.
The image doesn’t fit a Dapple Dandy, but that may or may not be only a marketing / photobank issue. The same goes for images of fruit on their nigra mulberry tags and others. It’s an issue I’ve noticed years ago when browsing their plants in nurseries.
So, looking at a different seller who buys from Jukka, I found out that Jukka uses that same image for Dapple Dandy, Queen Elizabeth and Flavor Heart. Flavor Supreme looks like Flavor Supreme, though. Go figure …
You can find a lot of tutorials on this forum and then you can always practice on any pruning leftovers to gain confidence.
It may take a while before pluots make it in Europe enough to be readily available and not just due to rights etc. .
If you wait until right after bloom, peaches are easy to graft using a simple splice that anyone can master in minutes if they have average finger dexterity. The cuts can be made with pruning shears. The double bladed Italian style works especially well for splice grafts and vinyl electric tape can hold the scion to the shoot you are grafting to. Wrap the exposed scion with parafilm and you are good to go- just make sure you don’t stick the scion on upside down and that the cambiums are lined up.
I just harvested a few more Flavor Gems today, and the fruit is growing on me. One I just ate measured at over 17 brix with a nice acid kick near the skin- that is as high a measure I can ever get from J. plums here and I honestly don’t think sweeter would have made the last two I ate any better.
Of course, they may not be so good next year (hell, they may not even bear fruit next year). We are having an extraordinary stretch of dry and warm weather at the perfect time for them.
