Has anyone tried Verry Cherry Plums?
They are patented as Sweet Pixie and sold as, “Pixie Sweet,” Cherry plums," and as “Verry Cherry Plums.” They are a cherry x (plum x cherry) cross.
I bought four pounds today at Walmart for $1.48 per pound.
I’ll take a picture tomorrow.
What did you think of your taste experience?
I saw them in Sams Club and thought about trying them but the ones I saw just looked like small plums. What did you think of them?
They look just like plums
For a cherry x (plum x cherry) I would expect to see something cherry-like, but these look like ordinary cherry plum or rather like cherry (plum) x ( (Japanese) plum x cherry (plum)). How big they are?
OK the patent says it’s [(Prunus salicina×Prunus avium)×Prunus avium] so it has to be true. Plant the seeds…
I bought some today at Sam’s. They surprisingly were very good. Very crisp flesh and sweet. However, as is typical with cherry hybrids these thing taste 100% plum. In fact, I’d say they are more like a pluot due to their crisp flesh. They do have a little tartness in the skin like a lot of plums. They are very small. Larger than a cherry but kind of in line with a beach plum.
For comparison I took a picture of the pit versus some others I was saving to stratify. You can see the pit is a bit smaller than a pluot pit but larger than Bing. It’s also flat like a plum. Overall these things are quite good. You can pop the whole thing in your mouth like a cherry but the pit is clingstone so its not as easy to eat as a cherry. Brix was as 22-23.
They are very juicy and sweet. The ripe ones have a cherry-like flavor.
Pitting them looks to be a problem
Or probably the seed parent, (cherry x plum), got contaminated with plum pollen before the Zaigers hand-pollinated it with cherry pollen. That could explain why they look more like a plum than a cherry.
Considering who is the breeder I have no much doubts that it’s cherry x J. plum hybrid. The fact these new varieties are much more plum than cherry like has it’s explanation. I would imagine that most of the seedlings resulting of such wide crosses are so inferior (sterile, low yielding, freaks etc.) that releasing them only will harm breeder’s reputation.
I do have experience with interspecific hybridization, not with fruits, but vegetables and the most serious problem is sterility. I’m sure it’s the same with fruits. At the end the plants with good commercial potential look much more like one of the parents (>90% of the genes are from one of the parents) instead of something intermediate, because the intermediate ones are plain useless. I guess it will require more time until such clearly intermediate varieties show up.
What kind of vegetables have you hybridized?
I’m not getting any cherry flavor at all. They are very sweet though. I ate a few more. One was so sweet I retested brix and it was 25. That’s even higher than the excellent Bing cherries I’ve been eating the last few days.
I’ve played with many of them, but settled mostly on squash. A 3-way hybrid between Cucurbita maxima, moschata and argyrosperma is the most complex I’ve done. It’s not as complex as is cherry x J. plum and yet there are a lot of the above problems, like 100% male sterility.
Do you have any pictures?
I’m also working on three-way hybrids. I pollinated a Myrobalan plum with peach x almond pollen, and my peach x almond hybrid with F1 Moorpark apricot. The Myrobalan plum seeds will be germinating in about a month or so.
Yes, I have made some pictures, but there is nothing unusual to see - parthenocarpic squash.
What’s your goal with those crosses? My 3-way cross was more of a play. There was a goal 10 years ago, but I lost passion, not to mention that the task is not for one man. I pay much more attention on my other breeding projects where taste is the main goal.
What is the fruit quality of your peach x almond variety? In theory, it has to be something inedible, unless it’s more of a peach rather than an intermediate hybrid. But maybe I’m wrong?!
My goal is to create drought-tolerant rootstocks for the California stone fruit industry.
This is the first year that it has produced fruit. The tree resembles more like a peach than an almond.
That is a massive task! Wish you a good luck.
