Just ate my first one now. Very good plum! What I liked most is it was different than any others I have. Had a nice meaty texture, with an almost tropical fruit/orange flavor in its profile. No noticeable tartness in the skin that is typical of Japanese plums. Looking forward to eating the other one left hanging. I can now understand the fuss.
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A very nice looking plum. I can’t find any reference to chill requirement. Only a zone 6-9 on One Green World website. $34.95. That may indicate it isn’t patented?
It’s a New Zealand produced plum as almost all my Google returns are NZ sites.
I wish I could filter my search to north american businesses.
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Hi Phil.
Luisa is of New Zealand origin, but there is no website, patent, or anything, where she specifies her requirement for cold hours.
You must use the forum search engine to see the members that have this variety, to see if any of them are from a warm state like California.
Regards
Jose
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I have been looking… Thanks @Jose-Albacete
One Green World sells the tree. I will call them tomorrow to see if I can get any info and post here.
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I had a pretty good crop on them this year. Unfortunately they were inconsistent and I was also having a hard time figuring out when to pick as neither color nor softness is completely reliable. A few were really great with the tropical fruit flavor someone mentioned above, but maybe only 10% had that. They soften too fast and go from underripe to overripe too fast. It could be my climate but it’s not looking super good for me now. But I’ll give it a few more years. Howard Miracle was another new dud plum for me, it was even worse as the flesh had some internal breakdown on most of them (browning). But the few ones without that were totally awesome.
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I find that there is some variation in some of my plums from year to year (variation in number of sunny days, night temperatures, rainfall, etc.) like you might expect from wine grapes. I have have had Luisa for about 8 years now and share some recent thoughts about it on the landing page of my website:
I am still a big fan of Luisa and think it will produce great fruit for home gardeners with similar climates (Eastern Washington/North Idaho).
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Thanks Mike, nice post!
Luisa might be better in cooler/drier kinds of summers given how it sounds like it is generally doing well for you and is from New Zealand. But I could have had an off year so will try it again next year.
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I did find a New Zealand reference for Luisa that has it at 350 hours chill.
That’s in my wheelhouse.
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