North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

[sherwin <sherwindu@att.net>]

I have to disagree with the choice of European Plum (also known
as Stanley) as being resistant to black knot.  One of our oldest trees
is a Stanley that was disease free for about 10 years.  Then it
started to develop problems with brown rot and black knot, despite
yearly treatments of sulfur and copper.  When I checked it further,
I found that Stanley is very susceptible to black knot, according to
most web sources I looked at.

I now have the brown rot and black knot almost in control again, but
I lost a lot of branches cutting away the black knot.  I'm not sure what
started this problem, possibly the age of the tree.  I hedged my bets a
few years ago by adding a NY 1502 plum to the tree, which is growing like
crazy and now is more than half the tree in growth and fruit.  By the
way, that NY 1502 Japanese Plum is a wonderful tasting plum.  It has
been around for several years now, so I wonder why the folks at
Geneva have not given it a name yet.

                            Sherwin Dubren
                            Morton Grove, IL

On 2/12/2014 5:53 PM, Alan Haigh wrote:
> The E. plum I've found to be most resistant to black knot is Italian.  Here
> in SE NY we get to put plums to the test as our native cherries are often
> loaded with black knot and apparently don't cover their mouths when they
> sneeze.  Here, Italian is not the heaviest of croppers and I'd rather do
> battle with black knot and grow other varieties such as Castleton, which
> almost always bears a heavy crop of prune plumes as sweet as can be (if you
> let them ripen properly) and Valor, which is quite reliable for me and when
> allowed to ripen until slightly soft as good as any plum I've eaten. What
> makes it better for me than other high quality prune plum is that it ripens
> over a very long period- through Sept to about the end of Oct in my Z6.
> Not a good thing if you don't have the time to feel every plum before
> picking.  Like Castleton, they look ripe long before they actually are.