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  • From: "William C. Garthright" <billg@inebraska.com>
  • To: North American Fruit Explorers <nafex@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [NAFEX] Pluots
  • Date: Sat, 22 Aug 2009 11:17:52 -0500


Bill, Flavor Grenade is a very late ripening pluot. I'm not sure when it will
ripen in your climate but its in the Sept-Oct range. So I think you just
need to wait on it.


OK, thanks, Scott. I'll try to wait, although I might have to add more netting. The birds have learned how to get inside, and they peck holes in one after another. :-(

Of course, I can't eat all the fruit I've got already! And I don't want to spoil the neighbors TOO much, do I? :-)


I have heard that Flavor Grenade is the one pluot which actually sets a crop
of fruit outside the west coast and it sounds like you are also having luck
on that front.


Yes, indeed, although this is my first year with fruit, so it's hard to say for sure. But the tree is REALLY loaded. Unfortunately, I don't think I'll like this variety quite as well as the others which didn't set much fruit at all. So far, this one seems to be almost exactly like a very large plum (that's not bad, of course, but I've already got plums).


I have been getting almost no fruits on my Flavor Supreme and Flavor King and
plan to try Flavor Grenade as my last attempt at pluots. It will also be
nice to have a plum so far out of the normal plum season.


That's true. All four of my plums apparently ripen at the same time, which kind of defeats my purpose in planting four in one spot. I wanted a little bit of fruit for a longer period of time, not a whole bunch at once! :-)

My peaches, on the other hand, ripen in order. That's been really nice. And I've got one variety (Intrepid, supposedly, though I thought that it was supposed to be an /early/ peach) where the peaches are still small and green. This is my first year with fruit, so I don't know WHEN they'll get ripe. Still, by then, it will probably be nice to have peaches again (right now, I've had my fill of peaches for a bit).


I have similarly enjoyed Spring Satin which gives me plums in late June,
about a month early. (Note I am calling these plums because thats what they
taste like, no apricot flavor in them to me.)


After the last variety gets ripe, I plan to report my experience this year with pluots in Nebraska. But right now, it seems like the Flavor Grenade pluots are like that - yellow-fleshed and way too much like a plum. But my other two varieties (which, unfortunately, haven't produced much fruit at all) are red-fleshed and different enough to be fun. I only got two fruit from the Flavor Supreme, but the first was ripe - dead ripe - on July 15. It was not only earlier than my plums, but also might have been the best fruit I've EVER eaten.

The second variety, Dapple Dandy, is also red-fleshed, but it's still not ripe. Since there were only a dozen fruit on the tree, I didn't net it. And as fast as the birds are destroying them, I might not get any ripe ones at all this year. I'll definitely have to net them next year. But as far as timing goes, they should work out pretty well, too, since my plums - and all but the last variety of peach - are done.

I'll report on these at more length later. So far, though, they've grown really well here in Nebraska. The Flavor Grenade was blooming on April 15, when it dropped to 23° F here (or, at least, at the airport a few miles away). All of the flowers and flower buds on my two apricots were killed, but it didn't seem to bother the pluot at all. As I say, it's just solid fruit right now. (Note that it didn't bother the plums, either, so this variety does seem *much* more like a plum than an apricot!)

Bill
Lincoln, NE (zone 5)

--
Political extremism involves two prime ingredients: an excessively simple diagnosis of the worlds ills and a conviction that there are identifiable villains back of it all. - John Gardner




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