Someone sent me a personal message asking about this plum which I believe is outstanding. He asked if it gradually came to its very dark purple color and the answer is no and that it fully colors long before it is truly ripe and delicious.
Elephant Heart didn’t set well again this year but my Flavor Rich and Ruby Queen did and they were both excellent in their own distinctive ways. Flavor rich got crazy high brix this year, some topping 28 which is sweeter than any plum I’ve ever harvested, yet some were relatively bland, but mostly real good. The pluot you can eat pretty crisp, but not Ruby Queen. It needs to be a bit soft but still meaty to be at my idea of perfection.
The color of Ruby’s flesh is astounding- purple black, and the plum sauces I made out of whole plums including skins were beautified by having them in the mix. .
I would not have been able to ripen these two were it not for nets. Downy woodpeckers were destroying them and the effort of netting them was very well worth it. This was a season to get top quality plums here and these two are among the best fruit I grow. Good thing they came through because my nectarine crop was an absolute bust.
I have enough frozen blueberries, sliced peaches, apricot and plum sauce to get my wife and I to next year’s harvest. .
It’s an average J. plum in reliability here about equal to Satsuma. It’s not as consistent as Methely or Shiro, although last year Shiro had terrible bac spot here to the point of defoliation while most other J. plums were not so badly affected. RQ has less than average vigor and I would only recommend it on myro root stock.
J.plums graft easily, so you really don’t have to agonize about what to grow. Get a good tree growing on myro and graft away. If the tree is growing in good conditions grafts can bear fruit the second year.
How well a variety will do on your site can only be realized by trial and error. I have had vigorous Methely plums take 7 years to come into bearing at sites for no apparent explanation, while it is usually very precocious. Plums can be very head scratching, especially the Euros.
Among the most mysterious for me among the J’s is Elephant Heart. It seems the ovules are less tolerant to cold than more reliable varieties here and it also takes longer than most to reach sexual maturity. Even in what should be favorable sites it can be extremely inconsistent bearing and relatively reliable at others.
Thanks for the info. I’ve not tried Myro in my climate, but nothing I read implies that it’s bacterial canker resistant enough for SE Georgia, but the same goes for Mariana 2624 which has worked great for my Methley, and there is a full tree of Mariana on a neighbor’s property which is beautiful but unproductive. (Mariana 2624 apparently has some chickasaw and goose plum in it which gives it some resistance to bc.) The peach and peach hybrid rootstocks don’t work at all here because the peach borers, then bk or crown gall get them almost immediately. What I mostly use are two very vigorous and highly disease resistant chicksaw cultivars, namely N.C. McKibben and Toole’s Heirloom. Every j plum and hybrid I’ve tried on them has resulted in a big healthy tree. The three biggest disease issues here seem to be bacterial canker and leaf scald. crown gall borers would be a deal breaker for growing peaches or anything on a peach rootstock around here. (Georgia may be the peach state, but that’s in the red soil parts of Georgia, north and west of here.)
Marcus
Two varieties we favor here are both Asian: Obilnaya is very prolific and can easily break the graft off unless you splint it first season, then Sweet Treat pluery is truly a nice sweet and is also a very prolific producer. I have Methley and several other Japanese plums for pollinators. Most of my grafts are on native p Americana or on peach rootstocks with Adara grafts. So I can easily graft any stone fruit to Adara
Adora is the one plum that I have had zero luck grafting to a chickasaw cultivar. I supposed that it could have been a problem with the scion wood itself. But I tried it on several chickasaw strains. It’s the only true P. carisafera I’ve tried to graft on Chickasaw, so maybe that was the problem.
Hi Marcus,
I typically only use Adara as an interstem. I have it and another native cherry plum I use for that purpose, but I have not tried grafting either directly onto my native plums. I used them to convert my sweet cherry trees over to multiple plum varieties so they are as far as I can tell compatible with most other stonefruit. The only exception I found so far is that for some reason Cotton Candy is not compatible with either. I had 100% failures trying to graft CC to my native cherry plum. On one mature cherry tree I have around 24 varieties grafted using both Adara and cherry plum interstems. This year I used about 15 props to hold the fruited limbs onto their grafts with Flavor King, Beauty, Methley, Obilnaya and Adara being the majority of the fruits that ripened. Fortunately I managed to catch the majority of squirrels around while they were in progress. So we got to taste test those varieties. Adara fruit is not bad but next year I will thin them out to make nutrition for the better varieties. I removed the majority of beauty and Methley to make room for Waneta, Luisa, and several others.
Best wishes
Dennis
Very cool. I hope you post photos and a good evaluation for Adara next year even though I don’t want to give precious space to another cherry plum. One of my main goals for adding more trees is to extend harvest time and to sell plums out of my yard as a side gig. I don’t really make money from them in the end, but they do help pay for my fruit growing habit. Thanks.
Hi Marcus,
The only reason I have Adara is due to its compatibility as an interstem. It’s fruit is nothing to boast about and the same is true for my native cherry plum; they are most useful as interstems. I noted you cannot rely on peach rootstocks in your region due to diseases, but here they do very well especially when grafted over with either Adara or Cherry plum, they make excellent multi variety trees. So you might not see any realistic benefits since their fruit is sub optimal, but if you really are interested in growing it I can always provide scions of either.
Dennis
I have Ruby Queen grafted over 6,7 years ago. I don’t recall it has good flavor fruits. Although it’s very possible due to not able to tell when it’s ripe. I have picked and tasted not fully ripe fruits. It is encouraging to know that it is a good flavored plum. Next year, I will pay more close attention and let the fruits hanging on the tree longer after they turned purple. The fruits are good looking purple and in good size. But it did not set a lot of fruits, lot of flowers though. I have it grafted on Santa Rosa, the Ruby Queen comparatively seems easier to get black knot.
It ripens very late and should be somewhat soft before harvest. If it isn’t sweet and delicious it isn’t ripe- that is, as it performs here. I don’t like tart plums, just a touch of tartness.
Great advice, Alan, thanks a lot. In your area, what’s the approximated month/date it ripens? I can just add one or two weeks after your harvesting time to my location
I haven’t experienced the fruit firsthand. What I know is that it, Black Ruby and Byron Gold were in part selected for their commercial shipping qualities. That is the fruit color up long before they ripen, allowing them to be picked and shipped long distances while still firm and basically green. The downside to this in a home orchard setting is that the fruit coloring up super early just makes it more attractive to birds and critters before it’s ripe enough for humans to really like them. The plums on my Sprite have exactly this problem. The fruit turns purple a good three weeks before I like them. Then they turn black and get soft and wonderful. But every single plum will have peck marks because they look ripe. But they aren’t ripe enough for even the birds to really like them.
Woven nets are not that expensive or time consuming to install when you know how to do it. You don’t need a frame to protect most of your plums. The only reason I got a great plum harvest this year was because I used nets. The Downy woodpeckers were pecking firm ones that would then rot.
Valor is my favorite E. plum, but my two trees of that variety are so big they are difficult to net and would require about 50X50’ to accomplish. I lost the majority of that crop. My Empress was more loaded on a smaller tree and netting it was easy. Bird pressure on plums here is very unpredictable but I knew this was going to be a great year to get up the brix in plums because we have been having a prolonged drought. I’m so glad I took the time to net my trees.
I agree with you about plums that color early- birds are also attracted to high brix pluots as are wasps.
Most of my plum trees are too big to net. I sell the fruit so I let them get about 12’ tall and 12’ across. In my yard I have about 40 huckleberry bushes which ripen with the earlier plums. and fewer but still numerous blueberries which ripen with the later season plums. However, Ruby Queen should bloom after the blueberries are mostly finished which could be a problem. No strain susceptible to brown rot is going to be productive here to begin with. For that reason, my Shiro may end up not working here. Thanks.
A 30’ by 30’ square should cover that and allow you to firmly attach it to the trunk. I net trees with that dimension every year at some orchards I manage. The nets can be reused for several years and can be purchased these days for about $30 per. It takes about 10 minutes to throw a net over a tree and the same to remove it.
Even if I was selling the fruit it would be well worth that. Around here many people, even those that love fruit, have never even tasted a tree ripened plum and will pay a premium for such fruit. $4 a pound at famer’s markets, for sure. But I live in a wealthy area.
That’s a consideration. This past year I sold plums for $15 / gallon which is a steel. But people come to my house for them. When I see them at the farmers market, they are usually sold $8 / quart.