Jesse, those last three pics you posted could have been promos for selling fruit trees. You may have missed a calling there. 
Gorgeous plums. Lovely pics.
A day’s picking worth of Toka, these will be preserves.
A very nice sized Superior, one tree picked clean, the other has a dozen or so still ripening. Long harvest window on this variety.
Stanley still has a couple weeks to go, but looking quite promising…
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Toka is finishing cropping for this season, in a couple days I will be picking my tree clean.
Today’s haul shows how productive this tree is. Along the bottom is some fruit from Superior (now done for the year), Toka, Alderman, Vermont- left to right.
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What a beautiful color. How sweet are they? Wow!
Thanks for the kind words, happy to share with all of you. Today I spotted SWD in my plums, thankfully my season with prunus is almost done besides Vermont and Stanley. So I clean picked a few trees, and steeled myself for some maggot ridden late plums😦. Sobering implications for seasons to come…
On a lighter note, we have a new catbird patroller-
Todays pickings, bowl on left contains seedling p.americana fruit, topped with the last of the Toka. The seedling fruit are better quality than last year, astringent skinned and drop readily from tree when ripe. Bowl on the right is Vermont plum, this year’s fav. Size is close to Superior. Rich meaty flesh, when allowed to go to dead ripe, blush covers fruit and mango flavor develops. Clingstone, but small skinny pit does make processing easy-ish. Skin is delicate, not as sour as my other hybrids, making this one better suited for cooking.
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Nice fruits, good kitty!! I should tell my cat to climb up the tree too.
Plumtastic!
Here is a tree I top worked this spring, a Stanley that died back, dead trunk will be removed shortly, to rootstock which sent out the smaller trunk on the left. I used it to demo a few different techniques for a workshop. I left one .5 inch caliper limb ungrafted as a nurse limb, the rest is now grafted over the Mt Royal Plum. I think it can lose the nurse limb next season and be well on its way to bearing fruit! It is around 8’.
South Dakota Plum is a very hardy late-season pollenizer p. Americana selection fruiting for the first time for me. Somewhat tough skin, freestone with sweet delicate flesh. Decent out of hand eating, easy to scoop out the flesh, so quite good processing, drying potential. Fruit is twice the size or more of my other seedling p americana trees. Also pretty resistant to splitting, ripening well despite recent rains.
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Wow… I’ve come across that South Dakota in reading. The seed looks big? Looks great. You got a full time gig there with those plums!
Do you grow Alderman? Its a huge pretty plum but one i find lacking in the flavor dept…although i’ve given them away and others loved them…maybe its just me.
Alderman yielded a dozen or so large, attractive fruit for me from a 4th leaf tree, I agree that the flavor isn’t top-tier, not bad but lacking aromatic qualities…
Plum season is coming to a close here, mostly waiting on Stanley, with some warm days ahead I hope it sweetens up. Rains over the past few days resulted in the final picking of Vermont plums being quite split- a downside to those delicate skins.
Good plums are right up there in my top favorite fruits. You guys have some gorgeous ones up there! If it weren’t for the fact that I’m incompatible with long, cold winters, I might consider living there just for the plums!
Stanley is starting to come in, here’s a preview of the crop to come, surrounded by the last picking of South Dakota.
This summer’s relative dryness and heat have made for some really nice Stanleys, very sweet, mild flavor. My tree is 7th leaf, and really cropping for the first time with some limb-bending loads.
Another bowlful, a couple Stanley and mostly Waneta, which overset fruit and went unthinned. Most sweetened up as they got to dead ripeness, some stayed bland-lesson learned with this variety.
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Now that I’ve starting using it because of Fruitnut’s continuing suggestions to do so, I find a refractometer to be invaluable in evaluating the fruit I grow. I’ve never considered Stanley to be a very good plum here because it tends to drop from the tree while still green and before reaching the full sugar that E. plums (especially prune plums) can develop. This year they have stuck to the tree better than in the past, probably due to drought conditions, and they are notably sweeter than in previous years.
Still, although they are sweet and good, Stanley’s brix is not topping 20 and Valor is hitting almost 25 from fruit I harvested today. These instruments are very cheap and are very helpful in making clear comparisons between varieties. I’m not saying this to criticize contributions devoid of this info- I haven’t even learned how to post pictures yet so I’m certainly not in position to criticize anyone for not submitting brix numbers. I only point this out here because I personally don’t think Stanley is a particularly good E. plum as grown in my region in SE NY- a long ways from S. Dakota.
A refractometer is probably in my future as well, very useful tool.
Stanley is the old standard plum in this area. This tree was purchased at a local garden center end of season sale, and fall planted before I knew that there are better choices for a prune type plum in z5. I always appreciate folks sharing their experiences growing like varieties to mine. These conversations could shape next season’s scion wishlist…
Once you start grafting the variety of any given tree can become much less important.
My location has been getting a maximum of 1" of rain every 3 weeks and my Stanley plums were excellent as well. The skins were a little tough, but that was the case with all my plums. They stayed on the tree until they were ripe. I did have some split when I picked them.
Alan, please explain.
I mean that a graft can bring a new variety into production within two years. Stanley is not an especially good plum but it is relatively resistant to black knot and rot for an E. plum so it might be a good base tree. Adam’s sells one called Bluebird that is touted as black knot resistant and I’m going to start using it as a base tree in my nursery for multi-variety plums. I grow trees on a myro rootstock so one tree will have insane yield once it comes into production.