I don’t recall any comments on that. It would be interesting.
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Well I hope I didn’t make a mistake. It wouldn’t be worth the effort if never any peaches/nects. Just a pretty plant, lol.
Thank you for linking that, AJ.
Dax
Any news from last summer, did the trials work out, did anything take hold on the P. tomentosa?
-Janne
Instead of experimenting I bought Prunus americna and moved forward. So, I didn’t do what I said I was going to.
Sorry 'bout that everyone.
Dax
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The initial info about compatibility - and the ‘relatedness to plum’ info - came from the late Lon Rombough.
I bought a bundle of row-run Nanking seedlings, and grafted peach and Japanese hybrid plums onto a few of them. Gave them to my dad.
I couldn’t tell that the plums were significantly dwarfed, but the peach (an heirloom white freestone) never got more than about 4 ft tall. Don’t know that I recall any of them ever bearing… but the farm and home were sold not too many years afterward… I don’t know if they’re still alive or not.
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I was a little surprised to find this on Wikipedia:
[Prunus tomentosa - Wikipedia]
the plant has long been widely cultivated throughout eastern Asia for its flowers and fruit.[4] It was introduced to the British Isles in 1870,[2] and the United States by the Arnold Arboretum in 1892.[8][9][10]
It is cultivated for a number of purposes. The fruit is edible, being an ingredient of juice, jam, and wine, and in pickled vegetables and mushrooms.[10] It is also grown as an ornamental plant, prized for its flowers and fruit, and pruned for ] Ibonsai, twin-trunk or clump shapes, or left upright. It is used for dwarfing rootstock for other cherries. In Manchuria and the Midwest United States, the shrub is planted in hedgerows to provide a windbreak. Under cultivation, it flourishes in well-drained, slightly acidic soil.
Several cultivars are grown; examples include ‘Graebneriana’ (Germany), ‘Insularis’ (Japan and Korea), ‘Leucocarpa’ (Manchuria; white fruit), and ‘Spaethiana’ (Europe).[6]
{Emphasis added}.
Looks like somebody else thought of it too!
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Not strictly a rootstock issue…but I’ve discovered the vast treasure trove that is Russian cultivars of…well, ANYTHING. When they said that in the east they have “some” cultivars of Prunus tomentosa, I did not know they meant this (google translate the page!):
http://vniispk.ru/species/felt_cherry
All-Russian Research Institute of fruit crops breeding, by golly they sure have things there.
That is a superb article. Many-many thanks!
Prunus japonica is on my radar!
Dax
All the pluots and Asian plums are compatible with tomentosa.
Nadia, pluerries and Adara are compatible with tomentosa but not the sweet or sour cherries. You can graft sweet cherries to tomentosa via Adara interstem of at least 4” long but the resulting scion graft would become proportionately bigger than the tomentosa.
My Nadia and pluerry trial grafts on VV1 (Krymsk 1) grew nice but died the next season. The Adara, Asian Beaut plums died in the same season after initially taking on VV1. The Janerick and Arrasia plums are compatible with VV1 but aren’t compatible with Adara on my first try.
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not sure if this has been discussed before, but really hoping that a strain of Prunus mira ( with a much delayed graft-rejection, or high compatibility with persicas/plums/cots to increase drupe lifespans) could be bio-engineered to serve as reliable rootstoc. I mean, for a drupe other than jujubes, prunus mira has an incredibly long life-cycle of ~1000 years, which indicates resistance to disease, locust plagues, and tolerance of drought, water-logging, and other climate aberrations, etc. Safe to say that the longer a tree has lived, the more likely for that tree to have experienced periodic, if not constant, onslaughts. Better yet, it would be wonderful if some non-profit lab could tweak it to produce decent fruits similar to persica’s, and/or seeds similar to almonds, since it is supposedly a cross between peach and almond. A long-lived arctic jay with an edible kernel would be nobel-worthy!
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Sorry to be realistic from an Agroecological perspective. The very basic problem of agriculture remains. The moment any plant species, rootstocks included, are grown outside of their natural habitats and are grown en masse, it would only be a matter of time that they too will have diseases and pest problems. Especially when monocultured. But hopefully we may have a lifetime of head start and let the future generation find another one or more.
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I agree when pertaining to some species, but also disagree with regards to many other species. If you’ve been growing citrus in china or southeast asia, where many citrus species are endemic to, you’re best bet to assure yourself of starting monoculture of citrus that is hlb-free is a far-flung region on earth where there are no vectors, and if there might be vectors, that the plants you might be exporting to that region are totally void of the disease. One may have to start them as seeds in a sterile region of earth, if so happens that their seeds breed true, to totally rid one’s worries of possible contamination using budwood. Now, CA and Florida citrus farmers have recently been complaining of hlb— but to most citrus growers in asia – hlb has been a painful fact of life several decades earlier. This is because diseases co-evolve with their intended victims.
bunchy-top disease is a killer of certain banana cultivars in southeast asia, and there’s no way of ridding the paranoia of one’s crops being afflicted if you continue to grow them in southeast asia, even if you use tissue-cultured clones, since the vectors are omnipresent, and many homegrown bananas nearby are afflicted. The most ideal thing to do is to find an island where no bananas have been grown before, and to only start a plantation using disease-free clones via tissue-culture.
jujube trees may live long in china and korea, where witch’s broom disease co-evolved with the species, but who knows? The lethal pathogen may some day destroy all juju trees there. Quite possible that we may , in turn, be sending back disease-free clones to china and korea, since the pathogen seems incapable of reaching american soil(at least not yet).
now, with peaches, nectarines, plums, etc, it is a totally different scenario, since the lifespans of these species seem to be just as short here in usa as they are in their native habitats in asia when grown as monoculture(since the pests/diseases seem to have found their way here a long time ago, and perhaps already evolving here as well) , so using a time-tested species such as prunus mira might just be the ticket. While it is not a 100% guarantee, the hindsight equivalent to 1000 years makes it a worthy wager!
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