The tree that I thought was a Delight turned out to be a Sprite. I got some plums off of it this year. But I neglected to get picks. The tree acts like it doesn’t get quite enough chilling hours here in SE Georgia. The fruit is very tasty when soft ripe and is still quite firm at that stage. It’s quite tart until then. A down side of the strain is that it colors up and remains hard and tart for a long time before softening and becoming sweet. That would be great if you plan to ship it somewhere, but here the fruit tends to get pecked or bitten into before its ripe enough for me to like it. I would say that it’s a marginal strain for the Bulloch County area in SE Georgia.
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I’m not sure they would ripen off the tree.
Your experience with ripening is the same as mine, although the critters here don’t know (yet) what they are. Next year mine gets a tree cage.
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Sprite becomes huge, and unless you have it grafted onto dwarfing rootstock or aggressively prune to control size, it will outgrow that tree cage pretty quickly I suspect. An issue with mine is that surrounded by larger trees and is growing strait up. I plan to prune it back quite a bit in the next day or two. As it is, I can’t really reach fruit.
I can tell you that it does ripen off the tree if it has already turned colors. I will add that you are correct about it not being freestone. At best I would consider it semi freestone, in so far as it does not have a lot of fibrous material attached to the stone. But the flesh does adhere to it. Thanks.
Marcus Toole
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Same here in NY. I removed mine several years ago.
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It is on Citation.
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Overall, I think Auburn University Cherry is a much better cherry plum both in the flavor and size department. They are still small, but they are bigger than sprite. It’s supposed to be self fertile, but I wouldn’t count on it.
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Thanks Richard for this reference, tells me a lot about one of my new additions this spring. Impressive heritage!
Dennis
Kent, wa
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Notice that the 700 chill hours is a non-starter in my location.
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AU Cherry doesn’t require anywhere near 700 chilling hours. We barely got 500 here in Statesboro Georgia this year, and the mature tree bloomed more tightly than the Sprite did. Sprite is supposed to have a 500 hour chilling requirement. All the papers out of AU on their varieties say about the same thing when it comes to chilling hours. My hunch is that this is based on temperature data in the warmest areas where they (AU) conducted trials rather than on real data gathered around crop failure based insufficient chilling hours. The research paper did not report any trial areas recording unsuccessful blooming due to insufficient chilling hours. In the end I suspect that 700 was pulled out of someone’s rear end as a safe guess.
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Meanwhile I have 200 here in a good year.
It will be very interesting to see if Sprite blooms properly with 200 chilling hours. The one I have here bloomed in spits and spats this year and most years which makes me think its not really getting enough chilling hours. I haven’t really calculated chilling hours this year, but normally I get about 600 chilling hours. (I should do that tonight.) But this was a very warm winter aside from that hard freeze right after Christmas. I would be surprised if we got much over 500 chilling hours if that. A lot of my Chickasaw cultivars had an unusually drawn out blooming season this year and not great pollination on account of it. I’m blaming it on lack of adequate chilling hours.
I have a mature branch of AU Cherry in a multi graft tree and a stand alone one that bloomed some for the first time this year. The branch produced a good crop this year for a branch. The young stand alone tree tree is on Mariana 2624 and was a couple of weeks ahead of the branch in the multi graft three with a Toole’s Heirloom Chickasaw root stock and a Robusto interstem. It’s hard to tell much about the tightness of the young tree’s bloom on account of it only having a few flowers on a few branches, but it did manage to make a few plums. It’s only a 3 year old graft. My Mariana was my only plum tree to explode into flower this year the way a plum tree aught to bloom. It didn’t have great overlap with any of the cherry plums which are its best polinizers. (I think Mariana is the cultivar with the lowest chilling requirement in my orchard. It’s for sure the lowest chill and earliest blooming cherry plum hybrid.) The Sprite was late blooming this year compared to other strains it usually blooms with. It bloomed in spits and spats for about a month. The tree is getting too much shade which is part of the problem. That may also be an issue with the mature AU Cherry. But I really think Sprite isn’t getting enough chilling hours here. With only 200 chilling hours, your tree will be quite the experiment.
I’m currently growing out a Mariana seedling, and I’ve grafted a Shiro in the hopes of getting a better pollination partner for my Mariana.
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I had zero problems with it at a location 18 miles south of here with the same chill hours.
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