I was busy thinning apricots and peaches and wasn’t paying attention to last year’s plum grafts, so I lost one. Valor is the most productive so far.
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Hi Kevin,
Sorry to hear this! What type of graft was it? Did you consider tiring it back up since it was still attached? I have had some smaller limb breaks reheal after tiring them back up and splinting.
Dennis
Valor is one of those too-productive plums, it takes forever to thin since you need to remove 90% of them. I am glad I have only one limb of it (was supposed to be two limbs but the other limb looks to be St. Julien, the rootstock… oops).
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Please post pics of your ripe Valor and the cut up fruit. I have grafts of outstanding @BobVance’s Valor (from ACN but they discontinued that variety).
I’d like to see what’s difference between yours and mine. Thanks.
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This is the first year I have a significant number of Euro plums, even though I’ve been planting them for a while, mostly 2013-2016.
This one is a Late Transparent Gage which was grafted onto a Rein Claude de Juillet in 2017. The LTG seems much more productive than the host tree.
I thinned about half of these off yesterday.
My Valor (from ACN) doesn’t have that many fruits. A few branches on a Jam session next to it have quite a few (but much smaller):
But, when looking, I noticed quite a few instances of brown rot on several of the plums. It looks like I need to go through removing damaged fruit and doing another spray. I just did Indar about a week ago (and Luna Experience 2 weeks before that and Infuse at the start of May), but I may not have gotten enough coverage. Either that of the brown rot is well enough entrenched that it is hard to overcome.
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I know @scottfsmith has said he gets brown rot under control with two sprays of Indar. Last year I needed two sprays of Immunox and two Indar to get good results but not 100% under control.
Next year,I will add either Captan or Dacanil and maybe, Bonide Plant Guard to it. I have been good at picking up any brown rot infected fruit. I have a small yard with a few trees so that is very doable.
Maybe my expectations were too high. I had figured that I wouldn’t see any rot at this point in the season after 4 sprays (A spray of Daconil at bloom, then Infuse, Luna Experience, and Indar post-petalfall at 2 week spacing).
@BobVance Have you used sticker with your sprays? How old are your spray bottles? Could they have gone bad?
I find it surprising that you got such bad level of rot with all the spraying that you did. I believe small fruitlets like those are even less susceptible to rot than mature fruit that are ripe or close to ripeness, which makes me even more surprised…
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Bob,
If I were you, I would have high hope, too.
How have you done regarding picking up and discarded brown rot/ mummied fruit in previous years?
To me brown rot is an increasing samaging if not treated regularly.
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The graft is a saddle graft from one of these grafting tools:
I decided not to try to save it since I had a couple of others and needed to remove some anyway - this just made the decision for me.
Will do Tippy.
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I think I forgot it in the last one, but used one called Tactic for the others.
The sticker is several years old and I think the Daconil and Infuse are 1-2 years old, but the Indar and Luna Sensation are both new.
Yup-that’s why I was surprised as well. I figured that if I had a problem it would be late in the season when ripe fruit gets damaged by something. Maybe I didn’t get complete coverage. I sprayed about 7-8 gallons from a backpack sprayer over a half acre lot which is mostly full of trees. Though there are plenty of areas I skipped (jujubes, pre-bloom grapes, berries, gardens, kiwi, etc).
I’ve done my best with peaches and nectarines at least to get the ones still hanging in the trees. I’m sure I miss some on the ground. But, I haven’t really seen many mummies with Euro plums- the trees have set so few fruits until this year that there wasn’t too much to rot. Until now, the main issues I faced with them has been black knot and a near complete lack of productivity.
To my mind there is no such thing as too productive an E-plum, what vexes me are shy bearers that only produce good crops half of the time. Even if you don’t thin plums they can have good sugar.
What I like about Valor is the fact it ripens over a long period and provides delicious plums off the tree for well over a month. That’s also what I don’t like about it, because the only way to know if one is truly ripe is to either shake the tree and eat the bruised but ripe fruit that way or keep touching fruit until you find the rip one. Thinning a big tree of valor really doesn’t take long, but the time I spend choosing ripe ones really does. Peaches are a lot more work to thin. Often I just knock of clusters of plums hanging below the limbs and then in late spring through early summer maybe remove touching fruit as I have time.
I wonder why you have so much more trouble keeping plums from rotting than I do. Are you bagging them? I don’t find that early spraying of Indar matters as green fruit that isn’t injured doesn’t tend to rot. I believe the Immunox is probably a waste of time- never had blossom blight. All I absolutely need for rot is a single Indar spray about a month before ripening. This applies to later prune plums like Valor and Empress, but also to those that ripen in the heat of summer like Castleton. Of course, the fruit needs to be clean.
I have a very long track record at multiple sites on this. I am using an airblast sprayer that reliably covers all of the fruit thoroughly and I use Tactic sticker. With Indar the sticker is really important but I assume you know that.
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