@tutti-frutti The problem is that they are all sold out. I am looking at The Nut Cracker Nursery since they do ship to BC.
Elephant heart is the same way, It grafts and takes super easily, but it dominates the tree in no time at all. One year I probably did 15 EH grafts I think they all took. Unfortunately, I’ve had to remove most of them as they wanted to take over the entire tree. I still have a few left as multi grafts,but I need to prune them back way way more often than the other varieties.
I think Beauty can be the same way as well, but I’ve found a really good way to use this as an advantage. If you have a tree with lower vigor that you want to grow scaffolds lower down on the trunk graft a super vigorous variety and it will take off, and you can get scaffolds growing where branches usually languish or die at the bottom of the tree.
As an example here’s a bud graft I did of Beauty way down at the bottom of an old Red Heart plum tree (into old thick bark on the trunk). I used a chisel to implant the chip bud of beauty plum under the Red Heart’s thick bark into the cambium.
https://growingfruit.org/t/2024-spring-grafting-thread/60055/355
https://growingfruit.org/t/t-budding-tutorial/6167/156
By rights the chip should never even have taken, now I have a 6-7 foot scaffold as a replacement for one that deer destroyed 20 years ago. Other plum/plumcot grafts that I made near the top of the same tree are only a foot or so long. So if you know you have an overly vigorous variety graft it down low where normally you’d be hard pressed to get anything to grow.
@tbg9b I think I have finalized my selection to Opal as you said it is a early variety, it should complement the Italian Prune pretty well. On top of that, I will get the Dapple Dandy and Flavor as @tutti-frutti says it performs well here. Thank you all for your input and I am excited to put in my order when they are open.
2 Likes
@tbg9b after reading your link, I want to try that t-budding technique. Really want to try it out on my infested pcl nectarine branch that I chopped back. I have tried bark grafting on it for 2 years but I have no luck with that. What’s the best way and when to get some fresh bud wood from gulf island ?
i think flavour Granade will produce more fruit than flavour king. However, I haven’t have a fruit on flavour Granade yet. You should get all three lol
I guess the way I worded the post I linked was a little confusing. It wasn’t actually summer budding I was performing. It was spring grafting with dormant winter collected scion wood. I only had 1 small piece of dormant Beauty plum scion wood left that had only one bud left on it. I cut the scion wood with only one bud into a wedge and lifted the bark and forced it beneath and sealed it up.
Frankly, I would have figured that graft had only 1 in 100 chance of working on such an old tree with such hardened bark.
Most new growth wood doesn’t harden up enough to use for budding until August where I live. I usually do most of my bud grafting in the middle of Aug to the first or second week in Sept. I’m not saying you couldn’t use non dormant wood to do the same graft I did, but I can foresee some issues with that.
A percentage of the bud grafts I do using new wood in Aug and Sept don’t wait until the next year to start growing. Our fall weather is so mild these days that some of these fresh bud grafts start sprouting right away. Which is OK if you’re bud grafting onto small potted rootstock. If the weather turns freezing cold and new growth only started in Sept, Oct, or Nov, then it likely won’t do well if the temp goes a fair ways below freezing.
The first year this happened to me it was on a Euro plum graft I did in Aug. The weather turned cold in Nov that year and I figured the graft would be OK. The temp went down to -7 celcius that winter, and I thought the new growth had been killed. Come spring it did start to grow again, but it was extremely stunted out that year. It did come back to normal growth the next year, but it was very close to being killed.
Now any summer bud grafts that come out of dormancy in the same year, I bring the potted trees inside just before any freezing weather to prevent die off.
Generally, fresh bud wood should be grafted onto 1 year old growth on the host tree/root stock. Trying to force a graft to grow under thick hard old bark is not really likely to have a high percentage of success. A side graft with dormant wood would likely be your best bet if you’re removing a larger limb to convert it to another variety. Even cleft grafts can sill work on limbs up to 2” that I’ve done before. However, this creates a lot of wounded wood that can take a long time to heal.
If you want summer bud wood in Aug let me know, but I don’t know if new wood would be suited to doing the type of graft I linked. If the graft did come out dormancy the same year, you can’t exactly bring an old tree inside. So you’d have to hope we have another mild winter with barely any freezing temps or the graft could be killed by the cold weather. Our warm autumn weather lately has lead to quite a few of my summer bud grafts coming to life just before winter sets in. This doesn’t allow enough time for the new growth to harden off if the temps go significantly below freezing. Just saying, there’s more than a few reasons why the type of graft I did in those links, probably isn’t a good idea to do with non-dormant wood in late summer.
Let me know if you do want some summer bud wood and I’ll try and get my sister to bring it over to the mainland if she’s heading that way at the right time.
1 Like
Thanks for the offer. I think I will just get the dormant scion this winter from ya. the only bud graft i have done is mulberry, it stayed dormant for a year, I thought it was dead but it budded out this year. 
1 Like
I guess I will get them all! I will have to convince my wife though, or maybe I’ll just do it first and then apologize after. LOL
Hi guys,
Just wanted to update my splash growing 2hrs north of Seattle. It’s been very productive this year over 100 fruits for sure but has been encountering splitting right after the rain. It’s splitting around the stem area, once it’s splits; ants will start attacking and eating their way through, causing them fall to the ground. The fruit is not 100% ripe, probably needs another 2 weeks. But is edible at its current stage. Debating to harvest them all or leaving it.
1 Like
Have you taste tested your splash yet?
I’ve been lucky my Plums all survived the rains without splitting. Although, the Shiro had a really washed out flavor because of it.
yes, I have been eating most of the split up splashes, they are just okay to eat. crunchy, tart and sweet. I cant blame the tartness because is not fully ripe.
I have tangle foot for the ants but for some reason they are still eating my splash. should I get some quail bird to terminate them?
Most of my plums I’ve eaten this year came in before the rains and were pretty good. I did eat a drop yesterday off of a mislabeled tree that I am more and more convinced is in fact a Burbank plum.
It was still not quite ripe, but very good. Hard to describe the flavor exactly. Very tasty as long as you didn’t eat the skin which was quite sour. The plums are all quite large. Burbank (possibly) on left, beside my largest Euro plum (yellow egg). I ate it like slices off an orange in wedges as it as still fairly firm. It was supposed to be Luissa plum, but I’m not overly disappointed that it isn’t as its very large and tasty.
1 Like
wow, the yellow plum is very yellow. and yah that looks like a Burbank’s plum similar to the black amber that I have tried in the past except with black skin.
1 Like
I found another drop today of what I believe is Burbank plum.
Here is Burbank (unconfirmed) next to Howard Miracle.
Interior of both plums, HM on the right.
I preferred the HM, to my mystery plum, but both were good. The HM was more of your classic plum flavor, the mystery plum somewhat reminded me of more of a peach type flavor.
The mystery plum definitely in the lead for size and production, especially considering this was its first year fruiting and the second or third for HM.
1 Like
I read it somewhere that HM taste like pineapple, is this correct?
Certainly not this year.
In prior years I’d say my plums had some very interesting flavors. I’m not very good at describing different tastes. My plum/cot/pluots definitely had some unique flavors reminiscent of other types of fruit In the summers where we hardly had any rain at all. In the drier years some of the fruit had spectacularly indescribable flavors. Most of the plums have been good this year but not awesome like in the recent extremely dry summers.
Could the mystery plum be Santa Rosa? That seems to be the mislabel of choice to ship to people.