Jim Cummins, the Cornell apple root researcher and co-founder of Cummins nursery introduced me to this variety as his favorite J. plum.
I didn’t get his take for years, and figured it was because it performs differently down state in NY and I stopped carrying it in my nursery or growing it in my orchard. However, I still manage it at a couple of sites where I planted them and I now am beginning to realize their appeal.
Fully soft ripe they seem watery and uninteresting, but when firm ripe they are meaty and satisfying… an Ozark Premier type that gets even bigger. While I lean towards highest brix purple fleshed types like Elephant Heart and Satsuma and smaller and sweeter (than Fortune) yellow fleshed ones such as Reema, meaty is nice, although in fruit it is not a meat-like quality, it’s more a crunchiness.
Fortune is the largest plum I’ve seen this year and I believe it’s even bigger than Ozark Premier, which I don’t manage anymore. I am going to at least put a graft of it on one of my trees. It’s refreshingly different than any of my other plums and looks beautiful in a fruit bowl of a variety of plums. A baseball among eggs and golf balls.
I guess I missed the window on that plum, I never had a good one so it got grafted over.
On the other end of ripening I just had a very late Laroda that the animals seem to have missed… it was very different than the earlier ones which are similar to Santa Rosa. The late ones are very sweet and with a different aromatic flavor compared to Santa Rosa.
Sorry all gone now. They are like Santa Rosa but less round. When they are really ripe the flesh starts to get some red bits in it and the skin gets very dark, almost looking black. When they are just normally ripe they are just like Santa Rosa. They ripened several weeks ago.
I never favored it but planted it for a client. I must have ordered it from Cummins because I usually get trees in bundles of 5 of the varieties I order, but all I ever managed was this one tree. There are lots of plums in its season and I really do like red fleshed plums, so when it ripens I am likely picking Satsumas. Fortune is quite late to ripen which makes it more valuable to me, but I still wouldn’t plant a whole tree.
I actually favor plums that I can put in the freezer and use during the long stretch of the year when I have no fruit to pick. For me, highest brix is best for frozen fruit that you are going to eat cooked are at least warmed up. Ruby Queen is the exception and is my favorite sauce plum among the J’s. If chefs knew how extraordinarily beautiful that sauce is the plum would be in high demand in the high end restaurant circuit.
Bird pressure on plums is very high here this year. I didn’t have a large enough crop of them to bother netting the tree so I only ate them at the point you consider under ripe, however, here they really don’t even seem to want to stay on the tree until soft ripe. I’d barely touch them and they’d fall off while still quite firm. I thought the ones that came off the tree easily were an enjoyable plum.