I already have an European plum in my yard (Brooks variety from Friends of Trees). I'd like to add a Japanese plum as well. Some of the information I have found online is a bit conflicting about whether European and Japanese varieties can cross-pollinate. Has anyone had any success with cross-pollination between these two varieties?
I'm also hoping to add a peach tree. I only have room for one, so it has to be self-fertile. It will be out where it receives full sun (not that it matters much in the rainy season). I've heard that the "frost" variety is the best suited for Portland's climate. However, it's really hard to find information about this variety (if you do a Google search for "frost peach" it's a very generic term that brings up a lot of irrelevant hits). Is this a tasty variety? Are there any other varieties you would recommend?
Peaches are usually more of a challenge for the first time peach grower for around here. I had a frost peach before and the blooms are much showier than other peaches and always more so than plums. With the delicious fruit all the effort going about covering the tree up as a barrier to rain and disease I would say it was worth it. For about 8 years until it got too large.
It is self pollinating.
Rooney said
Peaches are usually more of a challenge for the first time peach grower for around here. I had a frost peach before and the blooms are much showier than other peaches and always more so than plums. With the delicious fruit all the effort going about covering the tree up as a barrier to rain and disease I would say it was worth it. For about 8 years until it got too large.
Sounds like you were very happy with the taste of the fruit. Is it necessary to cover up the frost peach even though it's supposed to be resistant to peach leaf curl? What happened after 8 years? Was it too big to cover? In that case, what happened to the tree? Did it die or just stop producing fruit?
I have never seen Frost peach or any other curl free listed peaches be in danger for any other thing than twig and bark issues related to: bacterial canker (more later).
After 8 years of covering up I had to give up doing a whole "full sail" for the wind to pickup. Still never got curl following that first year although by then the same bacteria had destroyed a whole side of the tree all the way down to the graft which would have weakened it further. So I decided to cut the Frost completely away to start new grafts or new suckeres from my citation dwarfing rootstock. Can't remember which I tried for sure, but neither worked because I did not know citation won't initiate suckers, neither did I know how to properly handle storage requirements for peach at that time.
Had I been as smart back then I might still have Frost still because the disease never spread to citation so I recommend citation highly as I do almost any stone fruit hybrid stock.
There are peach farms around Clark County where I live. While they don't cover peaches (during Christmas to March 1 like I had to) they do use non organic sprays on them every 30 days during the high ebb of pseudomonas syringae and have some live over 80 years.
I have grown, or tried to grow, several curl resistant peaches. Those included Indian Free, Charlotte, Oregon Curl Free, and Q18 / Salish.
Indian Free - never took off, removed this winter. Minimal curl, no canker. It's not self fertile, so you don't want that one anyway.
Charlotte - 3 years, peaches good, minimal curl, no canker.
Oregon Curl Free - 3 years, peaches good, minimal curl, canker killed the tree last summer.
Q-1-8 - 2 years, no peaches yet, no curl, no canker.
Before I knew about leaf curl, I tried growing genetic dwarf peaches. Garden Gold, Honeybabe, and ElDorado. About the same growth and disease, all three get massive amounts of leaf curl and almost die every year. I tried covering with plastic, but it's hard to get the timing right. They bloom under the plastic, I take it off, and they get leaf curl. I finally dug up the ElDorado, the smallest and youngest one, and planted in a large container early winter 2014. I kept the container sheltered for the Winter, moved it to deck in Spring. There was no leaf curl, the peaches were small but so delicious.
Euro plums are tetraploid, and Asian plums are diploid, so they don't cross pollinate.
Im not certain, but I think Hollywood plum is self pollinating. It's a very pretty landscape tree, purple leaves, beautiful flowers. I have that and Shiro. I read they don't pollinize each other, but Im not certain.
Toka may also be self pollinating.
It's hard to say from my own experiences because I have multiple varieties, and usually graft a pollinizer within each plum tree.
Edit: Another way to get around the pollination issue on plums is buy a multigraft / combination. Raintree has them. I'm sure other places do. I like multigrafts. Sometimes one variety will grow faster than others. Pruning helps with that.
I have seedling ungrafted trees grow in my yard. I let one grow up. It has made great peaches some years, like last year, and nothing other years. It largely has to do with whether I can get the compost tea on it twice in the spring and how the weather was that year.
I had only Hollywood plums in my yard and no other plums that I could see in the neighborhood. My branches broke due to heavy fruit set. I decided to plant it in mostly shade. It still produces heavily. Now I have grafted other varieties on it, mostly to spread out the harvest, and have different colors/flavors.
I tried to grow Santa Rosa. I pruned it during the rain and it got bad disease. It never recovered while I lived there.
JohN S
PDX OR
It sounds like a multigraft Asian plum is the way to go.
As for peaches, it sounds like it will be hit or miss and I'll just have to experiment. I'll probably try a multigraft as well to spread out the harvest. Looks like I can get a multigraft that contains four disease-resistant varieties.
Thanks for the advice!
Idyllwild
jafar
Marsha H
Viron
John S
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