A quick update on my Nadia… it didn’t flower at all this year, its third leaf. The adjacent plums (Satsuma, Early Golden, and Ruby Queen) flowered (and have mostly gotten nailed by the weird weather) so I don’t know why it didn’t. They are all the same age so that isn’t a factor, and since I am in NoVA, zone 7a chilling hours shouldn’t be a factor.
I figure I will give it one more year and if it doesn’t produce something next year maybe take it out. It has grown rapidly and is a good looking tree… but I do kind of want it to make fruit.
It’s not unusual to take 4 years, especially cherry trees, and Nadia has cherry in it. Mine produced 4 fruit the 3rd year. Whitegold was similar. Sometimes they produce well the third year, but not always. It may be a shy producer, we will see… If so I’m leaving the tree, just top work it. Well sort of. 2 of 4 scaffolds are already for other fruit.
My Nadia that I just planted is all veg no blooms. The nursery where I got it from had some trees that were the same age as it with a few spotty blooms. I believe it is on its second season, having been grafted last year. It’s replacing my mealy, sour, apple tree which was in nearly the same spot.
My tree, third leaf, had lots of blossoms but no fruit, last year it yielded 19 fruit. It will be hand pollinated when it blossoms next year. I thought that other plum varieties very near by would provide pollen for it. It could be biennial, stronger harvests every other year. Fortunately, I grafted a Nadia scion a couple of seasons ago to a 15 in one fruit tree, all plum/plumcots, in my back yard. A few Nadia fruit may make it from that tree this season.
If it is biannual it would be the first plum or cherry I heard was biannual. AFAIK it is not biannual. Since 2 reports from Zone 9b and 8b one possibility is that it is very high chill. Also waiting 4 years for fruit would fit the profile of many sweet cherry trees. I have waited as long as 6 years for sweet cherries to produce. It took so long because conditions were rough and it was slow to size up. 6th leaf it produced, and produced well. That was a Glacier cultivar. My Whitegold sweet cherry only gets about 1/2 day of sun. produced 1 cherry third leaf (about 30 flowers). 4th leaf if produced about 20 (70 flowers). Now this year it’s 5th leaf. If your tree is not in full sun all day long, expect it to have to become bigger to produce.
I would also like to add that if you don’t thin properly and let your trees overbear, I can see a plum having minimal fruit the next year.
Having said that it is possible this tree is fussy. It might not be the best fit for many. If you can’t grow sweet cherry very well in your area, you might not be able to grow this tree.
My Nadia had a few spotty flowers last year. This year it is loaded with flowerbuds. I think it has more flowers than any other varieties grafted on it.
Mine is loaded too, Producing a lot of flowers and no fruit is super common with young sweet cherry trees. Every one I ever had (4 of them) did exactly that when young. Cherry trees are not like peaches, they are long lived trees. Some long lived nut trees take 40 years to produce. IMHO the reports are typical so far. My Nadia is in full sun. Third leaf it produced about 8 fruits, I expect a low count this year too. Much of it is grafted with other cultivars now, and they are still young, so not many options for pollination.
Here is how my Nadia hybrid grown from a seed from last years crop is doing. Sprouted last November, it is 28 inches tall. The leaves are much different than their parents. It will be grown in the container for a few years to see what kind of fruit it might bear. Scion wood from this will also be grafted next Winter to some established plum trees in the yard. Click on photos to zoom in.
So I have a question. There’s some plum roots that always sprout by my rain gutter about 20 feet away from the tree.
Can I graft Nadia branches that I’m going prune onto the shoots that come up from the roots of my Italian plum?
My thought is that I can get the big tree to do a lot of the work for the graft and once it’s taken and healthy I can transplant it when the time is right. Please correct me if I’m wrong I’m practically a total newb when it comes to fruit trees.
I also have Cherry shoots that come up in the yard that I could do the same with, likely a semi dwarf root stock.
It’s not at all a black cherry, it was a five variety grafted cherry tree so it should be some sort of semi-dwarf root stock I’m dealing with. I lost track of the tags years ago and my parents didn’t keep any record what they were either.
I’ll give it a try on the plum shoots when they appear, the tree is very strong and does well in the climate we have.
I’ll have to keep my eye out for some when they come up. Typically we don’t have plums seedlings because we pick up all the semi spoiled fruit that drops (damned rats). But there’s always some Cherries that sprout from seed because it’s too hard to find all the fruit that falls into the plants below.
Nadia has certainly been fussy for me. This should be third leaf for me (it’s still dormant here, as are several of my other trees) and no flower blooms so far, suggesting it could be quite high chill. One of the local CRFG members also mentioned that St. Julian is a terrible rootstock here in Orange County. Not sure why. It did seem that some of the other SoCal members have been having success though, so perhaps something more specific to me. Nadia has definitely found a way to keep the discussion going…
