Pluot Pollination Questions

General Fruit Growing
1

last year I planted four bare root trees close together (a la backyard orchard culture): Flavor Supreme, Flavor King and Flavor Finale pluots, and a burgundy plum. I somehow neglected to notice that Flavor Supreme needs 700-800 chill hours, which is on the border for what we get in Menlo Park, CA, and this year was exceptionally warm.

The FSupreme has no flowers. The FKing has lots of flowers. the FFinale and Burgundy both have a few flowers. Burgundy is self-fruitful, but the 3 pluots are not. I would like to try to make sure the FKing and FFinale get pollinated. DaveWilson.com says that FKing is pollinated by FSupreme, but my FSupreme has no flowers.

Am I correct in understanding that the only thing that limits which pluots or Japanese plums can (naturally) pollinate a pluot is whether they bloom at the same time? If that’s the case, given that I do have a few blooms on the FFinale and Burgundy, I’d like to manually pollinate the FKing and FFinale.

Is this a good plan?

2

Burgundy will pollinate all the others. You should have no issues.

1 Like
3

You should avoid a significant crop on 2-year old trees or they might get stunted. As your trees grow, there will be more blooms on all the trees and pollination will not be a problem.

4

As bleedingdirt said you should be fine with the burgundy. To my understanding FlavSupreme is notorious for being difficult to set fruit.

5

Thanks, all for the replies. I should have clarified that I don’t plan to allow many fruit to develop on the trees this year, but I would like to have a just a few (6-10 per tree). I’d appreciate recommendations for how many to allow.

Also, given that I’m never going to let these trees get any larger than 5x5x6h, is stunting still a concern? Does stunting refer to more than just being smaller? Does it mean less productive or other undesirable charactoristics?

I’m also still not clear on the question of bloom timing and pollinating. If Burgundy will pollinate all the others, why don’t the Pluot descriptions on DaveWilson.com say that? In most cases, DW is quite specific about what pollinates what, but in looking at the expected bloom seasons for each of the varieties, it’s not at all clear to me how the relationship between bloom seasons relates to pollination compatibility (i.e. compatible trees don’t necessarily have similar bloom seasons.)

6

from what I read on this forum, FS is a shy setter even in high chill areas with hand-pollination