North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

["William C. Garthright" <billg@inebraska.com>]

> Bill, I'm really curious about your Am-Jap plums.  ...  Do these plums crop well for you, and what do you think about them? 
> Some are said to make monster trees.


Monster trees? NOW you tell me!   :-)    I thought plum trees were 
naturally small, so I didn't look for dwarf trees when I bought them.

OK, keep in mind that I'm very much a newbie at this, Donna, and I was 
experimenting with the Backyard Orchard Culture I found on the Internet...

http://www.crfg.org/tidbits/backyardorchard.html

... in order to increase the number of varieties I could plant in the 
very limited space of my backyard. I'm not sure if I'd do that again, 
but that's a separate topic. Anyway, I planted four plums - Alderman, 
Toka, Superior, and Waneta - in the same location (in a square 18" 
apart). That was in the spring of 2006, but two of them didn't survive, 
so I planted replacements for the Alderman and Superior the next spring. 
Note that that was the year of the hard April freeze, so I didn't get 
fruit on anything that year.

So my experience is limited to two years, basically (actually, less than 
that, since I've only eaten plums from them once). But for what it's worth:

The Toka plum has been incredibly vigorous. When I try to keep it small, 
it just sprouts out at every possible spot, and every shoot grows like 
crazy. I just can't seem to do anything with it, since it grows so fast. 
But this is the first year I've got plums set on. Last year (it was two 
years old then), it bloomed a bit, but didn't set on any plums - or none 
that survived - so I don't know much about the fruit. This year, it's 
got a lot of plums, but nothing like the Superior (see below). (But I 
planted the Toka mostly because I heard it was a good pollinator.)

The Waneta plum has grown strongly. It's also three years old this 
spring (but all of the trees - from St. Lawrence Nursery - were REALLY 
nice trees when I got them). Like the Toka, it didn't bloom much last 
year, and I only got two plums from it. Frankly, they ripened at the 
same time as the Superior, and tasted about the same. (My attempt to get 
a variety of tastes and ripening times didn't work with plums, it 
seems.) But this year, the Waneta bloomed two weeks later than the other 
three plums, and although it was a mass of blossoms, it didn't get 
pollinated very well. There are plums on it, but not enough to need 
thinning.

The Superior plum has been incredible. This tree is younger than the 
above two, planted only two years ago, and it has stayed quite small. 
But last year, this tiny tree was a solid mass of blossoms and set on a 
huge number of plums. I had to thin them heavily (this was the only tree 
that gave me more than a couple of plums last year). I thought they were 
very good, but my elderly mother raved about them. She thought they were 
the best fruit I grew, bar none (I was more enthused with the peaches, 
but I did like the plums). Since the tree was so small, I wondered what 
would happen this year, but again it was a mass of blossoms and set on 
far more plums than any of the others. It's just incredible how many 
plums this spindly little tree wants to produce. Each branch was just 
solid plums, before I thinned them.

The Alderman plum is also only two years old, it has also stayed quite 
small, and it was also a mass of blossoms last year. However, unlike the 
Superior, it set on almost no fruit. (Again, the fruit ripened at the 
same time as the Superior, but didn't seem as good. Then again, I only 
had two of them, I think, so it's hard to say for sure.) This year, 
though, it set fruit quite well. Not as heavily as the Superior, but 
well enough.  The tree seems to be staying fairly small, just like the 
Superior.

Sorry, Donna, this is a pretty long email, considering that I don't 
really have much to say. As you see, my experience has been very 
limited, so far. I have yet to eat a Toka plum, and I've only had a 
couple of the Waneta and Alderman plums. So far, the Superior plum has 
been very impressive, but that's about all that I can say.

Oh, yeah, one more thing. My plums are crowded between my apples and my 
peaches, and the growing shoots have suffered from oriental fruit moths 
(though not nearly as bad as the peaches and pluots). I really haven't 
been spraying enough, I guess (partly because it's hard to find 
something I can spray on everything, given how crowded everything is). 
But my plums didn't have worms or anything in them last year. There were 
small markings on the skin of the fruit - and there are again this year 
- like something was piercing them to lay eggs, but the ripe plums were 
just fine. That surprised me. But maybe the infected ones didn't last 
long enough to get ripe. I did have some fruit drop (and squirrels 
carried off some of the plums).

Bill
Lincoln, NE (zone 5)

--
The rise of the West had much less to do with democracy than with the 
rise of secularism. The West's advance was chiefly related to the 
decline in the influence of religion that sought the truth by "looking 
in" to see what God had to say, and its replacement by looking out, 
deriving authority from observation, experimentation and exploration. - 
Peter Watson