Sunday, July 5, 2020

Not so common plums. Sultan, Peach-plum Hybrid DPRU 377, and Jefferson

Sultan plum was recently revived by few CRFG members.  I grafted this cultivar in 2018.  It produced some fruits the first time this year. These are very good meaty sweet dark plums. Ready in early July. The scions should become more available at the CRFG winter exchanges.

DPRU 377 was noticed by friends and myself during an orchard walk at Wolfskill in 2013. The leaves looked peachy from the distance, but the tree grew in the plum area.  We tasted the fruits and found them very flavorful. There are no records of this accession in the USDA GRIN database. And there was only this single tree in the orchard. The picture of the tag on the tree said that  it is a complex cross: MyroXSpinosa X Domestica

We obtained the scions from the USDA the following winter and grafted them. While the grafts grew well (on the proper rootstocks), the fruiting took years to occur. This year I got only 2 fruits on the tree I made in 2016 on the Citation rootstock.  My graft from 2014 onto the Santa Rosa plum branch is barely surviving. After tasting the first fruit this year I consider this maybe the best "plum" I tasted. Sweet, flavorful and very aromatic. It has unusual flattened shape. The stone is small, like a plum, but it has indentations similar to a peach stone. After searching though GRIN again, I found that accession DPRU 375 was originated from the former USSR in 1939. If the USDA was tagging the accessions in the order received, DPRU 377 could be from the same batch of acquisitions. This gave me a clue that I should be checking Russian web postings of plum-peach hybrids.  The search yielded two videos, both in Russian, that show this fruit and the tree.  Both look identical to what we found at Wolfskill.  My fruit in my picture looks lighter, I suspect it is because my tree grows in part shade and I covered the fruit with a clam shell to make sure it gets into my hands.

Sultan plum (left) and DPRU 377 from July 4, 2020

Russian videos about the peach-plum hybrid that I suspect is identical or very similar to DPRU 377



My Jefferson Gage Plum that ripened at the same time turned out to be mislabeled.  Most likely, it is an Asian plum that was sold as Green Gage Jefferson Strain by the LE Cooke nursery.  I got couple of these trees to use as bases for all other gages I wanted to grow. Few years later, I learned that this tree does not accept grafts of the proper gages. Even if they take for a year or two, they do not grow when grafted onto this plum. The fruit flesh of this plum is extremely, even painfully sweet, and juicy too. However, the skin is very sour. The stone never separates easily.  The tree is fast growing and very productive.

Fake Jefferson Plum harvested on July 4

Check our sales site for available scions reallygoodplants.com


9 comments:

  1. Оба видео ребят из Украины. Как называются - не знают, просто "гибрид слива х персик".

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  2. Только сейчас нашла этот комментарий. Да, это так, хотелось бы найти название гибрида

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  3. Any chance that you will offer scions of this plum in the future

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  4. Don, if you are in the US, send me an email. You’ll find the address at reallygoodplants.com

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  5. I have been trying to figure out the GreenGage" sold here in Southern California by two growers. One grower, Verde, calls theirs "European" Green Gage, and the other bare root supplier, Pacific Groves, calls theirs "Green Gage Japanese Plum". I know believe that Fruitwood nursery accurately describes this with their Japanese Green Gage Plum scion for sale with this description, "A very vigorous and highly productive Japanese plum that has fruit similar to the classic European Green Gage plums. Sold for years by the LE Cooke Nursery here in California it has the same rich and very sweet flavor as a classic Green Gage, A hardy tough tree it is much easier to grow in hot climates where the European version can be unsuccessful. A green turning to amber gold with a pink blush and very juicy plum. Highly recomended..". So I am left wondering are there really 2 different "Jeffersons" or are they the same thing? I have read similar comments to Orangepippin.com website where they say "The Jefferson gage was raised in Albany, New York in the 1820s and named in honour of President Jefferson. ", so perhaps there is a real Gage Jefferson and a fake on that is Japanese. Most of the growers who say they have a Jefferson describe theirs as a super early bloomer, before all other gages, so this makes me thing it's a Japanese plum. Perhaps it's a hybrid like Toka?

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    Replies
    1. I grafted this year another Jefferson gage. Will report when it blooms and fruits

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  6. https://www.creatorspalette.com/Ag-Horticulture/Fruit-Trees/Plums-and-Prunes/Green-Gage-Plum/

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    1. Only one fruit picture is actual green gage under that link. The ones with pink blush are Asian plums

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  7. This is most likely the same Jefferson that Trees of Antiquity sold several years ago. I focus on later blooming varieties of Euro plums, and this blooms much, much earlier than they do. It also blooms profusely, and has a fair amount of later "straggler" blooms, so it ends up fruiting fairly reliably for me in Ohio. The tree took american hybrid plum grafts well. Fairly disease resistant in my rainy location. Fruit hangs on the tree fine and gets sweeter. Nothing remarkable, but taste is refreshing. Very vigorous indeed. I hacked a 12 foot tree down to a 3' trunk with no branches. Never finished cutting the trunk down all the way, 2 years later I have a 12 ft tall tree again. The fruit looks like a large gage but tastes more like an asain plum. It is juicy, has moderately sweet flesh, sour but non-astringent skin. It is less aromatic than most asian plums, but that is the only non-asian characteristic that I can tell.

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