I am considering it. I may try a couple of buds when I top work a Prunus x cistena over to Hollywood plum.
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Any follow up on this thread?
Iām planning on trying to grow a bunch of bought peaches, rainier cherry, and bing cherry from seed for one year in the garden and plant them in a pasture and see if any survive and fruit.
Sounds greay. Even if they dont produce well you can always graft later.
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I canāt say the original plum tree was for sure an Italian, but a prune type Euro plum has been on my familyās property for likely 80 -100 years as the property was settled in the teens last century. This treeās plums were excellent for eating or preserving. Unfortunately, the tree finally gave up the ghost last year. Fortunately, I finally got a graft of this ancient plum tree to take on a root sucker I harvested from its seedlings.
This original prune plum tree produced many seedlings over the sixty years my family has owned the property. This was likely because my mom was always munching on plums and tossing the pits as she walked about. All, but one of the seedlings that sprung up from the original tree had excellent plums that were indistinguishable from the parent tree.
One tree that sprung up had inedible plums, so I top worked it with Japanese, Euro, and wild myrobalan. This tree was likely 15-20 years old but runty because it had grown up in a totally shaded spot. I dug it up in December and transplanted it. I figured it wouldnāt really be a big loss if it died, as it would likely never be very productive in the full shade location it had sprung up in anyways. Iāve actually had pretty good luck transplanting old fruit trees as long as the trunk was not much more than about 4 inches in diameter.
Most of the seedlings (except one) that sprung up from the original Euro plum tree were natural dwarfs that were under 8-10 ft in height. Unlike the parent tree the seedlings were not productive much more than 25 years. Iāve removed all but 2 of the plum seedlings as theyād stopped producing. One the smallest of the trees I cut down suckered profusely. I started using the suckers from this tree for root stock, but Iāve since stopped. When these root suckers were grafted, the graft usually took and grew well for a month or two, then died.
Root suckers from some of the other smaller size seedlings Iād cut down put on excellent growth when panted out and grafted. Late Italian and Elephant heart surprisingly put on 6 ft of growth in their first season when grafted to the root stock of these runty trees. Who knows how these root suckers from the seedlings will turn out for root stock, but I donāt have many other alternatives at this point. I bought 5 mariana 2624 rootstocks from Ontario last year, but thatās no longer an option as they were the only source and they stopped shipping to BC.
So that pretty much sums up my experiences with seedling Euro plums for fruit quality and use as root stock.
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