Sorry for the delay in answering your post,I had to get out of Dodge a few days.
I do have Superior and Alderman, never heard of Vic Red until your post.
Yes, for sure here. Lavina, Obilnaja and Catherine Bunnell are just beginning to open flowers. Superior, Alderman and all others plums have set fruit. Lavina, Obilnaja and Catherine Bunnell are a bit later than Beauty in my local.
Now, concerning @JesseS post, I’m wondering what plums he’s comparing Lavina early blooming to. I know in the past he has had Purple Heart and here Purple Heart is about two weeks earlier than the three plum above. I’ve had Toka in the past and it was the latest blooming plum I’ve ever grown and the least productive. I cut it out.
My affinity for the three plums above is not necessarily all about bloom timing, but how well these take a hard frost and still produce a nice crop. Down here late spring frost are inevitable, these has been stellar for me.
Strangely enough, Catherine B was in the first three plums to bloom this year. No freezes since then and fruit set was at about 95%. Other plums like Dapple Dandy and South mtns everbearing have less than 5% fruit set. I wonder how many years I blamed poor fruit set on the cold when it was actually a pollination issue.
To be sure, plum are very different in various local growing conditions. I have followed many recommendations only to find most didn’t work in my area. Experimenting with a lot of cultivars, and now after many years I’ve settled on a group of thing that work well and consistently.
I agree that ability to withstand frost while in-bloom is an important and often overlooked trait. Last year my Superior plum was in full bloom when we were hit by an ice storm that coated it in a half-inch of ice. It still overset by about 500% and needed to be dramatically thinned. I was very surprised.
Hi Trev,
The majority of my plum varieties are already in full blossom as of last week.
The ones that are laggards and are just beginning to swell blossom buds, that might work well for you are:
Drag Queen
Green gage,
Pipestone,
Waneta v
Vic Red
Lavina
Lopez#4: from Lopez Island pioneer orchard.
Wild Goose: from Okios nursery
Local native red plum, not yet swelling buds!
Others you mentioned are already well along and considered among my early bloomers:
Obilnaya
AU Cherry
Beauty
South Mountain Rosa
Spring Satin
I can provide scions of my later ones this winter should you want to add them
Dennis
Kent, wa
There are brown rot resistant plums out there. A highly brown-rot prone variety probably can’t be made to work in the SEUSA. I’m far enough along with my Shiro, that I will let it bloom and try to produce a crop. But getting grafted over to something less brown rot susceptible may be in its future. That’s especially when we have a couple of good southern varieties like Sonny’s Yellow and Byron Gold that don’t brown rot.
Drag Queen was fairly early blooming for me, much earlier than AU Cherry. Even with this cool winter we got, I don’t think it got enough chilling hours because of how it acted.
My Lowes “Gold plum” is loaded with flowers this year, so maybe I will finally get to take a guess at what it is. I’m doubtful it is byron gold though. Those on their website are from several different nurseries and not from their in store supplier.
That’s interesting! Here it’s just the reverse with AU Cherry at least 2 weeks ahead, must be our climate or it might be because the AU cherry graft is 2 years older?
Dennis
I’m highly confident that Gold Plum is something different and inferior. I’ve seen more detailed descriptions of it. According to those descriptions, Gold plum has quite a small fruit, and Byron Gold is supposed to produce really big fruit. I had one that died of bacterial stem canker when I first started trying to grow plums. But disease pressure in my yard was much higher back then than it is now, and it was probably on a peach rootstock. A chickasaw cultivar rootstock really is best in SE Georgia. I’m trialing it again. I have one grafted to a Toole’s Heirloom Chickasaw rootstock and one to a Ridgeland Chickasaw plum rootstock. Both are growing pretty slowly. The one on Ridgeland tried to bloom a little bit. Gaging from that, it’s not a particularly early bloomer here in Statesboro, GA. It bloomed with Robusto and Toole’s Heirloom. It was a little ahead of but bloomed with my “probably Methley”. But it bloomed after the early bloomers like Ridgeland, Drag Queen and Segundo. A friend of mine has gotten one plum off his in Waycross Georgia last year. It was a big old plum, and he insisted that it was good. But it was one plum on a very young tree. Based on his experience it does not appear to be cross fertile with Sonny’s Yellow which is an excellent yellow chickasaw cultivar. A farmers market vender friend of mine grew it commercially years ago. He insists that it sells really well but that he does not particularly like the flavor. He’s been telling me that based on his experience with plums over many years of growing them commercially in Georgia that the Sonny’s Yellow strain is the best of the yellow plums out there, at least for the South. We are still learning about pollination with Sonny’s Yellow. We know wild type chickasaw plum works. We know that flatwoods plum works. We know that Byron Gold does not work. What we don’t know yet is whether true Asian plums work. There is no way to test that in my yard on account of all the chickasaw plums I have.
This is how Sonny’s Yellow looks. They are roughly galf ball size or a little bigger. They are definately not as big as Byron Gold is supposed to be. Judging from the one photo on this thread, I’m guessing that they are about the same size as Shiro plums, or at least the one in that picture.
@DennisD … of the varieties of jplums I have now that bloomed this year… AU Rosa was first to bloom… then about a week later Shiro and AU Producer, South Mtn EB plumcot started blooming…
About half way thru Shiro and AU Producer bloom my Vic Red American plum, Superior and Alderman bloomed.
I added 6 varieties by graft last year… and about half of those bloomed this year. Beauty grew well but did not bloom this year. I bet it will bloom about the same time as vic red, alderman, superior.
Just after my later ones bloomed this year we got a frost at 32-33F.
All of my jplums are done blooming now… a lot of brown blossoms out there… i did see some fruit on that was still green and shiny… and some blackened…
Pretty sure I traded with someone and got EU plum scions of green guage… which I will add to my EU plum Mount Royal once it leafs out. It is just now starting to break a few buds.
Quite a bit later than my jplums and aplum this year.
I am going to add a couple grafts of AU Cherry plum to my Shiro and AU Rosa now.
Once I know a little more about fruit set of everybody, I will post a table showing bloom time and fruit set quality of all my plums here and in a couple of other threads so that it’s easy for people to find.
Has any member seen this one fruit? Also I am curious about the “EB” in its name, what does it signify? I got my scions from Robert at South Mountain, but I’m not sure he used that name.
Dennis
Kent, Wa
South mountains EB plum, South mountains plumcot are both the same. EB stands for everbearing. It is the tree I bought from Lowes as Gold. I suspect it is a plum seedling rootstock from a failed graft. I feel like I was lucky in that respect. Its qualities are a nice firm red flesh, high brix, up to 20, and the tendency to bloom through June, allowing another chance at setting fruit if you have pollen.
I bought scions of Lavina and Oblinaja this year, and was going to ask if they were blooming together. I have a Shiro already which produced one plum it’s second year and looks loaded with blossoms this year. Last year may have been better were it not for frost. So I was wondering if they bloomed together. I remembered seeing them talked about here and pictures on Cummins and they sound like pretty solid plums.
I think they’re Salincia x Cerasifera? So I’m not sure how well they’d work for Superior/Toka/etc? Those sounded fussy and maybe needing a straight American (or Canadian) plum seedling/selection for pollination?
