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  • From: Lucky Pittman <lucky.pittman@murraystate.edu>
  • To: hector black <hblack@twlakes.net>, North American Fruit Explorers <nafex@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Cc:
  • Subject: [NAFEX] Native plums
  • Date: Wed, 18 Jun 2003 10:49:07 -0500

At 08:40 AM 6/18/2003 -0700, Hector wrote:
The only reliable fruiter we have is one I got some years ago called the "Wild Goose Plum". It seems to
be one of the natives. Tart red blush skin and yellow flesh that makes wonderful jam and not bad eating
if you don't mind the tart skin.
Only problem is sends up new trees for about 15 ft. around. I just graft them or
mow them.

As a kid, I remember picking buckets full of native plums(I'm fairly certain they were P.angustifolia) from thickets growing at the edge of old abandoned fields on the 800 acre farm behind the house I grew up in, where my dad ran beef cattle. There were some thickets that produced markedly better fruits than others - I remember one, in particular, that produced large(for the species) yellow-when-ripe fruits. They were the best. Yeah, there were some with curculio damage, but the majority were pretty clean.
Even a couple of thickets of what my dad called sloes - bitter fruits, but I'm not at all certain that they were actually P.spinosa - don't recall the leaves being noticeably different, but that's been better than 35 years ago. May have just been Chickasaw plums with poor fruit quality.
I'm saving pits from this clump in the orchard to spread around edges & small openings around the farm, and will probably dig and transplant some suckers to the proximity of some of the wildlife foodplots this winter.

Lucky







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