Plums are unpredictable. Some varieties seem to fruit well at one site but are shy at another for reasons beyond my knowledge. I hope that FV is simply very late to mature… the customer where I have the only tree growing that I manage is selling the house, but I grafted it on one of my trees. I will eventually find out. Actually, now that I think of it, I have it at a couple of other sites. One of them I’m visiting today. It has a scattering of fruit (tree is probably 8 years old) except on the Empress graft I put on it, that is loaded with fruit.
Valor is my staple prune plum that I use all winter out of my freezer. It likes my site and tends to be a bit sweeter than Empress as well as saucing much better.
I planted a lot of Seneca early in my business and it took years for me to figure out that it wasn’t compatible with Long John which was supposed to be self fertile but was barren with Seneca as an only companion. At two sites this was a problem I grafted a couple other varieties on the trees and now they are productive of all varieties.
Fortunately, most of my customers keep me around so I have 30 years experience in some of the orchards I’ve planted out from my nursery. I stopped planting Seneca 20 years ago, but this year I brought it back to my orchard and nursery via grafting. Not all my plums need to be max producers.
Actually, I took another look and there is a decent amount of fruit. Both on Fake Valor and on a number of other plums. I actually thinned them a bit today, before taking the pic.
But, I may have lost the Mt Royale graft. A cursory search didn’t locate it and it is possible it got pruned out at one point when I was cutting black knot out. Speaking of BK, I’m sure you can see some in the above pic. Plums are so rarely productive for me that I decided to not cut out any BK if there were several plums further out on the branch. After I finish picking I can give it a good examination and decide what gets chopped or chiseled (maybe flamed, as Scott has been doing recently).
One interesting thing I noticed was a number of fruit with a drop of sap on them
Either way, I had a bit of spray left from a few weeks ago, so these plums got another shot of insecticide and fungicide, after I finished thinning and pruning them.
If it isn’t very productive for you, it isn’t any surprise that it has had zero fruit since I planted it in 2016. I’m not sure if it has even flowered.
From a quick count, I have 17 Euro plum trees in my yard:
Castleton & Seneca (multi-graft from Cummins)
Damson
Jam Session
Fake Valor
Vision
Bluebyrd (replaced by Muir Beauty graft when it snapped of at union)
Mirabelle, Geneva
Kubanskaya
Opal
Late Muscatelle
Leonie
Rein Claude de Juillet
Middleburg
Anna Spath
Ersinger
Gras Romanesc
Bavays Green Gage
And there are a number of grafts as well. So, I should be completely covered from a pollination standpoint. I suspect my pruning as the culprit. In recent years I’ve tried to both keep the trees short and thin the branches a bit to reduce self-shading. I should pay attention to my harvest this year and possible either remove or reduce the size of some underperformers.