Curious to know what the heat requirements are for pluerry trees. My understanding is that in these hybrids the first half of the name is the part that dominates. So this would be plums. Those grow well here in our 10a/sunset 17 climate. Cherries can be good but aren’t as reliable since they definitely enjoy more heat than plums.
Can anyone out there confirm? Or reject? Wife says next tree has to be for the kids so that’s where the pluerry choice comes from here. All I know about them is that they’re plum and cherry mix and the kids devoured them when wife brought some home from Trader Joe’s last year. Advice appreciated.
They’re just low chill Japanese plum trees for purposes of growing them. They’re not self-fertile, so you’ll need two Japanese plums (or close enough hybrids) with overlapping bloom times for fruit.
got it. i assume cherry would pollinate as well? we have existing cherry tree, but no other plums and neighbors dont have any either.
i guess i could try and graft another variety of plum or pluerry if cherries wont work.
Anyone growing these in the north east? Curious about them
They will be a better choice than sweet cherries
With sweet cherries you can do absolutely everything right including the intensive spray regime and pain in the butt bird protection that will almost inevitably kill some birds and you can and will regularly experience near complete crop failure due to splitting from inopportune spring rains (which the presence of lack thereof is THE defining characteristic of a poor or good cherry growing climate)
Scott’s section on cherries should be helpful if you haven’t looked at it already
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I wouldn’t go quite that far on sweet cherries… I get as good a crop of cherries as anything else. This last year was a bad one with lots of rain but I still got many pounds of cherries. I lost about half of my White Gold due to splitting but a half harvest is still a lot of cherries. For birds I use scare tape not nets.
Re: pluerries I’m thinking I might try some given how well they are doing for @Ahmad. I grew the Sprite/Delight cherry-plums many years ago and they were not exciting so I didn’t pay much attention to the pluerries.
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How’re they on late frosts compared to something like J plums or apricots? In between?
I’ve never had them freeze out. The order from worst to best for stone fruit is something like apricots - J plums - E plums and sweet cherries - sour cherries - peaches. This last spring I lost all my apricots and maybe a third of my J plums, and not much of the others.
Oh, Nadia was another cherry/plum bust for me. It did not ripen evenly and most fruits were not so good.
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Wow truly things aren’t as bleak as I thought if you choose a good variety like white gold. Thanks for the clarification