Verry Cherry Plum: can I grow from the stone?

General Fruit Growing
#1

Trader Joe’s has one of my favorite summer stone fruits: the Verry Cherry Plum. It’s so crazy flavorful that I’d love to grow it at home. Their website says the following:
“The fruit is a delicious natural cross between several varieties of plums and cherries, including Bing and Stella cherries, just to name a few.”

There are unfortunately no trees available for home growing. Might anyone know whether a tree grown from the pit of one of these fruits would bear similar fruit? If it’s a natural cross, that leads me to believe it might be stable and not a hybrid, but obviously I have no clue. I’m sure the only way to truly find out will be to grow it and see what fruit I get, but I thought I’d pose the question here to more experienced fruit growers than I.
Thanks!
Jen

#2

This would be a great final exam question in my biology class. I don’t think you will get the same fruit from growing the seed, but the results might be interesting anyway. I assume (strongly) that the commercial variety (that is a natural hybrid) is propagated by grafting, not by seed. In general, when the tree makes seed the genotypes of the parent(s) get scrambled, and the offspring will differ from the parent(s) (there are exceptions to this). With grafting, genotypes don’t get scrambled (although you could always get somatic mutations occurring). This is why “seedling” trees have a lot of variation (they are meiotic segregants), and grafted ones don’t. But if you plant your seed, you might get an interesting segregant that is worth keeping.

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#3

It may or may not bear similar fruit. You have no idea about the parent tree the pollen came from, or even what kind of a tree it was (cherry, plum, or ?).

The Verry Cherry Plum was developed from a proprietary plum crossed with a proprietary cherry with Bing, Stella, and other varieties in its background. It was developed by this company Flavor Tree Fruit which happens to be a couple of hours away from me.

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#4

This Verry Cherry Plum is a load of rubbish it seems. It is not possible to cross plum with a cherry, it would be like crossing a human with a horse - impossible hybrid due to different numbers of chromosomes. Just a marketing bluff, how can people believe this I do not understand it. Clearly it is some selection of a Japanese plum and not a true hybrid.

Cheers

#5

What??? Whats your logic?

They cross lots of stone fruits with each other, and come up with things like pluots, plumcots, apriums, pluerry, etc… Of course lots of breeders try making crosses that are to far away from each other genetically to be compatible parents, however if a breeder, like zaigers for example, started with parents on each side and crossed closer to each other all the time, sooner or later something would be compatible. Large breeders cross tens of thousands of plants each year. It not just marketing hype, there truely is years and years of development behind some of these crosses.

#6

There are quite a few established cherry plums that have been on the market for years and are widely grown by people on this forum. A lot of them were developed by Zaiger genetics as pointed out by @Kellogg_Hill_Farms. Cherries and plums aren’t that different, genetically. They both belong to the genus Prunus. I used to have a couple varieties of cherry plums myself. Some are more characteristic of the cherry side of their lineage, and others are more similar to a plum. But they are definitely not just a selection of a Japanese plum.

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#7

I’ve got a few growing from seed that I started last year. No idea what the end fruit will be like since I don’t know what the pollinator was, but I’m excited to find out. There are a few hybrid cherry plums available to home growers. Check out the Bay Laurel website, they seem to carry the most.

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#8

@Lex,
Not sure if you live in the USA or Poland. Like others have said, here in the US, we have several interesting crosses here.

If you were with us on the forum a few years ago, you may have gotten the Nadia ( cherry/plum cross) fever like many of us, me included. That one is a product of Australia.

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#9

Just following up with anyone who started some Verry Cherry Plums… It’s been almost a year. How are they doing?

Rick

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#10

since this thread was bumped I want to point out that skepticism of interspecific stone fruits is now going on 100 years! check out this excerpt from an article on Burbank’s breeding efforts, 1928:

The Apex “Plumcot” has been grown at the New York Experiment Station at Geneva and according to Wellington {Tech. Bull. 127, 1927) is a typical Prunus salicina and Hendrickson in California classifies it with the varieties of that species. The cross of plum and apricot is still more doubtful in view of the fact that Wellington failed to produce viable seed in many crosses of apricots with Japanese and other species of plums. Neither will the Japanese plums cross successfully with the European plums to which they are much more closely related. This, of course, does not prove that the union cannot be made. One can never say that. At the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station we have produced well developed fruit and apparently good seed from the application of apricot pollen to the emasculated and bagged flowers of the Abundance plum. None of this seed has germinated. Some horticulturists who have grown plumcots are fully convinced that they combine features of both fruits. It is possible that certain varieties under special conditions will produce an occasional viable seed but until this is confirmed, the cross must be considered unproved in spite of the firm belief that Burbank had in this new fruit. He spoke of the astonishing number of variations in the second generation seedlings and the tendency of plum factors and apricot factors to segregate in the second and succeeding generations together with the production of sterile forms.

from BURBANK’S RESULTS WITH PLUMS
Journal of Heredity, Volume 19, Issue 8, August 1928, Pages 359–372
https://academic.oup.com/jhered/article-abstract/19/8/359/863553 (don’t pay for this! get it from a library account or something)

#11

Welcome to the forum,Rick.Thanks for your interest in growing fruit.

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#12

The second half of this thread Verry Cherry plums has other members doing this. I grew out several Candy Heart pluerry seeds, the resultant fruit, if any, is different from the parents. When parents have children, are they all clones of one another? No. The best thing to do is to grow out as many seeds of the desired variety to increase the chances of a desired fruit variation. You might be lucky growing one seed on the first try, why not increase your chances growing out 10 or more and graft the best ones to a plum tree after they produce fruit.

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#13

The discussion above starts on May 2018 in the Verry Cherry plums thread.

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