Same with my Italian, unfortunately they all cracked and even burst from yesterday and today’s rain. I won’t even bother harvesting them although I could probably still make good prunes out of them if I had a dehydrator.
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I’m sure the good harvests I’ve had this year have been due in large part to the very dry weather all summer
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That wouldn’t make the harvest bigger, just the fruit better.
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Well talking about dry weather, my gages, mount royal, seneca, etc were just about ripe when the last 5 days included 4 days of soaking rain (all day rain each day), 90% are cracked, a perfect followup for a rain soaked year, hopefully next year will be dryer.
Eric
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And so it was - quite rot-free
Now the porch is full of the aroma of drying prunes
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Wow, that is tough. I hope you still have plenty of later plums- here my latest plums rarely crack. Something about this last rain, though. Really made a mess of anything almost ripe. Didn’t cause my over ripe green gages to crack- the skin is sagging so isn’t taut enough to crack.
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Sorry to hear that.
We had all day rain yesterday, That’s enough to cause several of my Epineuse/Middleburg plums (not sure what it actually is) split. My loss is so trivial comparing to yours. Hope your remaining plums will be great for you.
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The weather forecast got it entirely wrong, they called for 40% chance of scattered showers for all the days, instead it rained continuously, if I had known I would have picked ahead but its to late now. THis has been a terrible year for rain, cracked all the sweat cherries, a muddy mess thru July, a couple of dry weeks in August then back to the rain. Good thing I have a day job.
Eric
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I can’t hit like. Wish there was a sympathy symbol to hit instead. We had similar weather but probably a lot more clear days between rains. Peaches and nectarines have been huge but not as sweet as I’d like. This last rain created most of the problems with cracking- plums were coming in great for weeks before this. Plums are the one fruit that has normal sugar so far.
My business is managing other people’s orchards and after the previous terrible season my customers are just happy to have lots of fruit- most already have harvested plums. The rain has hurt my fruit crop, but my nursery trees have grown twice as much as on a normal year, so the rain is a mixed curse (or blessing).
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I have a second leaf Inca – only two fruit this year. Too young a tree to have a good opinion, but on first taste, not overly sweet – good balance in flavor. Birds seemed quite interested and they seemed to get more damage than my average plum. Inca has been getting more attention from the SoCal nursery people this year for whatever reason. I can send scion wood if you’d like in January.
I’ve got Inca as part of a 4in1, with Inca the trunk you can see below.
Inca pre-cut…
Inca cut…
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Scion would be great! I’ll contact you in January.
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That is very nice of you, Bob.
I’ll be interested to know how well it will survive and produce in Drew’s zone 5.
By all accounts, it is a low chill plum for warmer zones.
Just reading through Washington state university fruit trials and they pulled Inca due to no productivity. Be interested to hear how it does in your zone too.
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I believe the nectaplum is low chill. Some do well as does the nectaplum. Although it is more nectarine.
That’s what I love about grafting. Minimal investment and something to experiment with. My yard is full of high chill apples and some out of place stone fruit. The combination of experimentation and potentially having something no one else has is fun, even with the failures. I think it’s interesting to read some of the crazy things people do to grow citrus is colder climates. Citrus is easy here, but boring – everyone has one!
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Agreed. I don’t have many trees but I have many grafted varieties.
The only problem I have is with the fruit varieties that bloom early like most apricots and some plums. We have late frost quite often. Having blooms get wiped out is very frustrating.
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Almost no one has tasted any of the stuff we grow on our trees- even the common varieties, because commercial versions of same varieties pale by comparison. I think you’d agree that the pleasure of exclusivity is shallow compared to the pleasure of biting into something delicious you’ve never tasted before and sharing that experience with family and friends.
This year I experienced about 7 varieties of plums for the first time and 5 were exceptionally good. I immediately shared those great ones with my wife, to our mutual joy.
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Which plums were not good and which were?
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Very good point Alan. For me, the whole point is to share these unique tastes with others. This is really the first year I was able to bring a decent assortment to places like my work and I was amazed by the positive reception. I can’t wait to share more.
Great Yellow seemed very good at first, but a lot of the later plums were bland- the growth was extremely vigorous so maybe when the wood calms down and we have less rain it will end up being like first fruit- tropical punch and very good for such an early Euro. The few Larodas I tried were as good as J. plums get, but Scott has not found it to be productive- I will need a few more years to know. Reema wasn’t quite as high brix as Laroda, but wood was overloaded and the fruit was still extremely good. De Montford was very good for such an early prune type E plum- ripened with Shiro. American Mirabelle was boring but sweet. Too small to be worth it for me. A couple of others I seem to have lost labels for and one of them is outstanding while the other one is ripening now and would be real good if it wasn’t such a cracker. I have to check it and see if many plums remain on it. Plums seem to crack less as we get into Sept. Tropical rains destroy plums prone to cracking.
I would not run with any of my advice on these new plums yet, except to inspire your own experimentation. 3 years ago I asked Eric to send me some wood from a few of his favorite plums and given all his plum experience I"m not surprised he gave me a treasure trove. He got only Autumn Sweet from me, which is proving to be too much of a cracker to be functional here, even though it’s ability to build sugar while still crisp is exceptional in my collection of E. plums. It’s like a pluot that way. But it gets cracks that yellow jackets like to exploit because of its high sugar.
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