Nadia cherry plum Zone 5b

Zone 5b …after consistently cold winter…and lowest lows of minus 32 minus 33 Celcius….happy to say Nadia cherry plums (hardy to zone 5) …are budding…I wasn’t sure about planting them since I am trying to altogether avoid at least one of the many downfalls of tree fruit losses…and plant only things that are a whole zone hardier (zone 4 or less) Having had such great luck with chums …(hardy, precocious) I debated whether to plant Nadia …temped by promise of actual cherry flavours (due to sweet cherry parentage as opposed to sand cherry parentage). Yes the chum family is incredibly hardy due to sandcherry parentage…but if you have ever tasted a sandcherry …at least I can say of Eastern sandcherry.( with eyes closed you might discern that it is a fruit of some kind…sweet and with fruitlike texture…but entirely devoid of flavour…let alone cherry flavour) …so the chums I had already planted and harvested had wonderful dark cherry colour…but being of sandcherry parentage…no discernable “cherry” flavour. …but Nadia is in another class…having sweet cherry/plum parentage…the reviews state they have cherry flavour…so I am quite excited about the prospect of a sweet cherry flavoured fruit the size of a small plum !!! I can only guess my two Nadia trees will be better suited to survive winters as they get bigger…so YAY for their first winter in Zone 5b !!!

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You may be a year or two behind on Nadia Craze on this forum :smile:

People all looked forward to a cherry with a size of a plum. Not sure it has met expectation. I personally want to reserve my judgment. It tasted all right but I detected only a hint of cherry.

All I can say is that when it first came out, Nadia was super hyped. It was nuts.

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Haha…ok …par for the course I guess…well…after the craze has died down…how does it rate…you know…overall and aside from hype…in the great pantheon of plummage ?

A few of us have eaten them. You can check it here.

it seems growing conditions are all important for any of these fruit…I live in an area with very wet late winter/early spring and then often near drought like conditions soon afterward with a lot of heat…so maybe that will make for a more concentrated flavour…

I like Nadia. I don’t really detect cherry flavor, but it doesn’t taste much like a plum either. It is a little tart, and has good flavor, maybe excellent. I only had a few so far. But I liked them. I’m happy with the flavor, productivity has been low. Many more plums are around it now so hoping more flowers produce fruit this year.

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My Nadia has bloomed sparsely this year (first time it has bloomed at all) and it has set a few fruit that I am looking forward to trying.

It has proven to be a vigorous upright tree for me, annoyingly so actually. It just wants to grow straight up. With that said it is a pretty tree and hasn’t had any real disease problems.

I found it very responsive to grafting too. I have limited space, so added other plums to the tree. Seems all have taken well to it. I hope it helps with setting fruit. Only one scaffold is actually Nadia now. I expect to harvest Lavina, Laroda, and Spring Satin off the tree this year. All are flowering. Laroda and Lavina grew 3 feet after being grafted, never seen anything like that on most other trees. My Indian Free peach has some pluot grafts that grew just as well though. I noticed too that the graft scar seem to heal very fast on these. I used wedge grafts, about the ugliest graft you can do, and you have to look hard to see where it is. I actually cut a Lavina graft off this year, the smaller of the two I had, yikes! Not on purpose! I was doing late winter pruning and shaping. When i was cutting the pruned wood down to put in yard waste bags I saw the graft! I’m an idiot! Well I can put something else there now! The other Lavina graft is loaded with flowers. I will have to thin a lot! It’s a 3rd leaf graft and about 4 feet long and branching well.

Interesting…I have so many chums and they are a breeze to grow and seem quite disease resistant…knock on wood…thought I would try Nadia because the sandcherry parentage of the others leaves them without detectable cherry flavour…as eastern sandcherries are…don’t know about western …haven’t tasted them …but it sounds as if the description posted by sellers is not quite accurate if they also have little cherry flavour…I have found that some people taste with their eyes…attributing flavours based on colour…such as descriptions of haskaps…which to me taste mainly like tea leaf, plum , apple/strawberry…and to some lesser degree blueberry and raspberry …in that order…while most descriptions go right to blueberry/raspberry…which both have distinct flavours that to me are not prominent flavours in haskap.

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Nadia has sweet cherry parentage not sandcherry parentage.

yes … I mentioned “the sandcherry parentage of the others”
my point was that I was commenting on what someone had written about the Nadia with sweet cherry parentage not being very cherry flavoured…so why bother with growing it when …the chums with sandcherry parentage are also not very cherry flavoured but hardier. The one and only reason I ordered 2 Nadia trees is to have a chum that is more cherry flavoured (as the advertisements say, due to its sweet cherry parentage)than the other chums with sandcherry parentage…but I am now hearing that it is not so cherry after all.

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I like the fruit, I like the growth habit of cherries too. Easier to renew wood on cherry trees than plum trees. let alone peach which is hard to renew.
I have commented I don’t really taste cherry, I don’t taste much plum either. Rather unique, more like a plum than anything else, although again I never tasted a plum that tasted like Nadia.
I relate it to say like mixing strawberry and banana you get a very unique flavor. Ice tea and lemonade, etc. Plum and cherry you get something unique, and I do taste that. It brings another flavor profile into plums. Further crosses may result in some amazing fruit.

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“Further crosses may result in some amazing fruit.” That is what I am doing now.
Thanks Drew for the blueberry advice, they are doing great!

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Yes, very cool. I keep losing seedlings! I only have one this year left, and it’s on life support.
I need to get them bigger. I lost my first round when they were fairly big, a year old and we had a very hard freeze early in the fall and they were not ready, too young, all died. The second round Spider mites got so bad as to kill them. I thought I got them in time too, oh well, I’ll try again! I still have one. And I have other cool seedlings like a very hardy Morus nigra mulberry. Most are not that hardy!

Fall Fiesta set fruit this year, so I want to grow out some of those seeds. It includes plum, cherry, peach and nectarine in its parentage.

HOW DISEASE RESISTANT IS THE NADIA CHERRY PLUM?
I am in zone 7a, middle Tennessee.
Thanks!
Frank

Im in zone 5b north shore of Lake Ontario, no issues with it here so far 3rd year, no fruit yet , not as warm as where you are year round but probably just as humid.

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thanks

sounds like perhaps they stopped short of another cross to bring the cherry flavour into it…but I realize its more complicated than that as most of these are just happy mistakes and adding more sweet cherry in the mix doesnt necessarily get you back on track to creating a worthwhile fruit…

I agree. These days I’m growing out seeds I didn’t cross. I’m letting Mother Nature do the work. I’m fairly happy with what I have. I will still cross from time to time. I like the Dapple series pluots as they are big, grow well here, produce a large crop. And are delicious! Dapple Supreme being my favorite.

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Drew, when does Dapple Supreme ripen for you?