Flavor king is finishing up it’s season and elephant heart is just starting. It is getting cold here so elephant heart might not make it in my climate zone 6B with a somewhat short growing season. I have to admit that I always thought elephant heart was my favorite plum but flavor king (I know not a pure plum) is better in every way. Don’t get me wrong elephant heart is a great plum but flavor king is better if you can call it a plum.
To me Elephant Heart tastes a lot like a satsuma plum but it is a lot bigger. I love eating them but what is the point when you have Flavor King?
Flavor king taste a lot like Santa Rosa but has more flavor intensity, is sweater, comes off of the pit easier and is a lot bigger compared to Santa Rosa. I have been eating 3-5 a day and don’t even care that the wife and kids haven’t figured out how good they are. They have as much flavor intensity as a musk melon but it is that good plum flavor, I also taste other notes like strawberry and Swedish Fish?
The Elephant Heart tree tends to grow straight up making narrow and weak crotch angles that break easily in the wind while Flavor king doesn’t seem to have this problem. The only bad thing about Flavor king is that the birds and paper wasps have eaten about half of what my tree made this year while they haven’t touched the Elephant Heart, I think this is telling.
Flavor King
I have grown Flavor King for a while now and it is a good pluot. I also like the Dapple pluots as they produce well, are good size and have a great taste at least here they do. Overall I like the pluots better, but not all are good. I have been finding newer pluots are not that good. Maybe after a few years producing they will get better. I didn’t like Flavor King at first too.
I recently harvested Fall Fiesta and found them rather bland,. But it is the first time crop ever.
Is it not worth growing Flavor King on the East Coast? I saved some seeds in the late summer from fruits I shipped (and saw half are already sprouting in the fridge ziplock bag, guess they don’t need much stratification).
Flavor king is a really unique flavor. I can’t describe it and can’t eat that many at once. It’s nice to taste IMO but I don’t need hundreds of them on my tree and will graft over some branches.
Some pluots are very susceptible to bacterial spot, which dooms them in my northeastern climate. Some just don’t seem to produce well enough. FS seems to fall into that category.
FS is one of the all time great fruits. FK is really good but a step or two below FS. FS problem is it’s difficult to get fruit set due to lack of pollination. I think the flowers aren’t attractive to bees. They fly up to the flowers and fly off without pollinating. I’ve grafted FS into all my pluots hoping to get some set of FS. It’s worth all the effort.
Mine has a major scaffold with Lavina grafted to it that blooms here about the same time and is positioned above FS. It hasn’t helped- something else must be going on… at least here.
Flavor Supreme practically failed to fruit as usual while my Flavor Gem set a very heavy crop that got the highest brix I’ve ever gotten from any plum- I think 26.
It was a great year for plums, last year Gem set no fruit but it set a good crop the year before. I didn’t leave them on the tree long enough then, though, It is an Oct plum here.
Flavor Gem might be a very good pluot for my conditions but I need a few more years to test it out. A problem may be that that pluots don’t tend to be available on Myro and seem excessively fragile on Citation.
A forum member posted something about Flavor Supreme’s flowers,having some kind of structural problem,that prevents a good pollination set.
Then again there are pictures of branches,loaded with fruit.Maybe getting some of that scion wood might help?
Dapple Dandy, Flavor Grenade, and Flavor King all vastly exceed Flavor Supreme in commercial production in CA. That probably tells us something because the high quality of its fruit has long been well known. I guess it isn’t enough better that they can charge twice the price for it.
If it is hard to crop in CA imagine the situation in tougher climates. . .
I was just visiting an orchard in the San Joaquin valley. The grower said he only gets about 100 fruit per tree. Even with all the other plum varieties he has growing around it.
Don’t think they are wind pollinated. FS requires bees or hand pollination. I once hand pollinated a small tree and then had to hand thin. But it was worth it.
If they were wind pollinated the CA orchards would also require hand thinning.
So the pollen from another plum can literally drop on FS flowers without reaching the stigma? That’s just weird.
You suggest the pollen is not attractive to bees, but I see bees all over their flowers- they must not be receptive to their own pollen. I think something else is going on here. Their flowers were well tended by bees and flies this last season and not only was there Lavina in the same tree tended by the same bees, but a tree nearby was loaded with Elephant Heart and Early-magic blossoms whose flowers are also early. Elephant Heart also did not set hardly any fruit in the 24 harvest.
