I would settle for 20 Brix cherry-sized freestone nectarines with smooth cherry pits. Or a quarter pound cherry that tastes like a plum. Have you considered trying to improve your odds with hormones? Most of what I have found on the subject is behind a pay wall, but looks pretty interesting. I have only just begun digging, and I have a year until the trees flower again.
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I was thinking that since Nadia is 50% Supreme cherry and 50% Black Amber. crossing it with a cherry would result in 75% cherry. Would Nadia be easier to pollinate with cherry pollen since it has a very high percentage of cherry in it?
Here is a photo of my pluerry experiment. The two fruit on the left is from a second Candy Heart seedling grown about 2-1/2 years ago. The fruit is slightly larger with bigger tails, Candy Heart is taped to the branch to the right for comparison.
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It would be nice if Supreme cherry were available here, or if there was more information available about the lineage of the variety. Many sweet cherries are incompatible with each other, so I can not help but wonder what the odds are of accidentally finding a match. I also can not help but wonder if self-fertile cherries would increase or decrease the chance of a successful cross.
One possibility is to try to collect cherry pollen from every willing member whose cherries flower before your plums./pluerry. A large variety of pollen might improve your odds, but would likely lead to a mystery parent. I think compatibility will be on an individual basis, and a cherry compatible with one may not be compatible with others.
I have some Nadia grafts I hope will bear fruit in a couple years. It would be fun to try to pollinate her with a cherry, or a plum/apricot interspecific.
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I only did it with peach kernels (apricot pollinated) but none of the germinated.
I guess it could work but only with a self-pollinating cherry like Stella.
I just tried a new embryo rescue technique. Will it work? I don’t know.
I pollinated Italian prune flowers with Rainier cherry pollen. After that, the flowers developed into fruit, but today I noticed that they started to shrivel. So I extracted the kernels and I dipped them into aloe vera gel then I placed then inside the bag. And finally I put the bag inside the fridge so they could go into cold stratification.
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Hi. How many seeds did you plant at the time and what % successfully shot up? Also were the resulting seedlings all very similar to Candy Heart?
I planted four seeds, three are small trees in pots and scions of them were grafted to a small Burgundy plum. All three are bearing fruit for this season. The fruit is all different shape wise compared to the parent, Candy Heart. Last year one of them bore fruit as shown in the photo below. I liked the taste better than Candy Heart because this fruit had extra acidity making it taste more citrus like and less like watermelon. The fruit should be ripe in mid to late July. The pit was rounder and did not flake apart like Candy Heart, another desired quality is it is semi-cling, Candy Heart has much more cling to it. The fruit size is similar.
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It looks absolutely delicious! Too bad most of its parents seem to be z6 as a low as they look delicious also. Do they taste anything like elephants heart?
They look great. Would be interested to see how they turn out this season as well. Cheers
Elephant Heart has a sweet-sourish plum taste to me and drops off of the tree right away when ripe. This, like Candy Heart does not taste anything like a plum, to me. It also hangs on the tree much longer after peak ripeness.
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Ahhh the looks always reminded me of elephant heart and the descriptions with the cherry taste sound great, sadly i have never tried one. Thanks for the description and your breeding efforts are doing great!
Update:
I guess I was wrong about the 100% fruit drop. I was watering my Burgundy plum and I noticed that there’s one plum hanging on the tree. And it’s from the branch that I pollinated with Stella cherry pollen.
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That’s great! I Hope that the seed is viable to grow what could be a new hybrid.
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If it turns out to be a plum x cherry hybrid and once it starts flowering, I’m going to back cross it with another cherry.
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Just curious how this project turned out, any updates?
Failed.