I have tried sprite and delight cherry plums which are many times listed as part cherry. Mostly they are listed as 2 plum species crosses between p cerasifera x p salicina. So if that is what you are referring to then they are all plum and per plums bloom very early and when they do set fruit they are not very large but the taste is good. 

The pluerry is a trade name of the real hybridization which occurs from California between prunus salicina (plum) and prunus avium (sweet cherry). I have not had any but from what I heard they might be worth buying. The biggest problem is the overbreeding in California lends to poor survival for us here in PNW.

I have a cross between real cherry-plum from Australia "nadia". It does not fall into the trade name pluerry. It is not fancy breeding by the exporter from Australia. Therefore it is a first generation cross that simply tastes like a plum and for some reason still flowers early like a plum. Mine is hard to grow here but I can manage it next to my peach under plastic.

Mine is still too early to tell if any of the developing fruitlets will fruit. Somehow mine has always managed at least one plum in the last 3 seasons. It blooms the earliest and of course bees are not out doing pollinating. So this year I marked the flowers that I had pollinated myself from my 'Owen T'. Mysteriously they aborted and some later stages of flowers (possibly from bees) look promising so far. Possibly apomixis at play since nadia does not produce pollen.

I am suprised yours still lives out on the open. Everywhere my peach or nadia branches stick outside of the covered area those branches die-back.

So good to hear that. Then my tree health is worse due to accumulation of stresses having been rootbound in no more than 5 gallons of soil the last couple years -why it makes so much sense then. 

You might want to do as I have to increase fruit set on trees that tend towards infertile when exposed. Long before Lon R passed away I used to (at his place) look for fruit on hybrids rows of mature prunus hybrids that should have long since bore fruit but had not. Now and then in good winters like the one past a few bore very shy of a crop the one year but none of anything very valuable as one might expect having been derived halfway from apricot (the rest plum).

Then at which point the project turned into a non breeding aspect and a matter of PNW conditions of fertility. ...and if your memory serves you well you know by now that I grafted those few shy bearers onto my big 'Emerald Beaut' plum, still before Lon passed.

Long story short: I never had fruit produced the natural way, not even when I grafted a good myrobalan plum there as pollination patrner. However un-naturally I had been able to get fruit when a branch would keep positioned under the overhang from my roof (also hand pollinated). Same with this year and same tree when I recently had dipped a couple branches into aquarium antibiotic treatments over the whole night then pollinated. -resulting in a balanced crop load. 

That's alot of dedication spanning a long time and by next year I hope to further that by trying make do to the same upon the old original trees that have never yet bore or (for that matter) been evaluated for quality.

You should be able to accomplish it with the same however I can't really say that if you continue using the treatments it would continue to work. They react against pseudomonas syringae bacteria that over time can develop a resistance. I rarely use it when it is important for me as above, and subsequently for an important cross.

I don't really have much time to list all the important ways to resource the disease the way they have in plant botany over the years. It's much easier when it's submitted to the researchers that are more widely familiar, which I do.

Fruitfly said
Has anyone tried either Cherry Plum or Pluerry? It would be nice to have a cherry that's bigger, mostly cherry and a little bit of plum flavor.  

I have grown cherry-plums in northern Ontario, for several decades. They originated in the prairie provinces of Canada as crosses between the hardy western sandcherry, which is really a plum, and tender Japanese plums. The results we have today are hardy bushes, whose fruits are very flavourful plums, of diameter 3 cm or smaller. They have somehow lost popularity in recent years and so it is now hard to find a nursery that carries them.

Synonyms for cherry-plum are 'plum-cherry' and 'chum'.

Link: https://www.newsoptimist.ca/op.....-1.7136075

jafar said
Have you had any fruit from your Nadia. Mine has bloomed for a few years but has yet to set a single fruit.

It's out in the open.    

My original containerized Nadia bore poorly this year (as usual) even though it is shelered, but the Nadia that I had grafted of 2 years and already flowered on the marianna-2624 rootstock matured and made a big difference. Very large crop of plum like fruit with a heart cherry shape to them. No shelter no disease.

Another evidence that most *f1 hybrids show greater potential as quicker responders (known as SAR) to the effects and threats of disease and in this case mainly an arial attack prunus disease of bacterial gummosis, and not the fireblight so more common to pome fruits.

*1960s work involved cherry studies around Oregon, England and others (ie hybrid 'colt')

Methley is an F1 hybrid too like Nadia is by the way. P1 and P2 for methley is 2 other plum species salicina and cerasifera. I have seen it lots in breeding charts used by ARS breeders in California. I tried to ask those breeders for F1 apricots between hunza species and the domestic types. They had lots for trial here but I gave up on the idea. There was too much red tape involved but somebody needs to try the idea since F1s fare well here.

Not had ever tasted methley before. Have you had 'shiro'? If so do you like them before going soft or after. To me an almost ripe shiro was the best plum I ever tasted. But now that I have hybrid 'lydecker' I am slowly getting my shiro trees replaced. Lydecker produces well, is more freestone than shiro, and is my new favorite now for flavor. Lydecker blooms very early like nadia, tends towards bushy with light branch structure that break easy making them a hard target for racoons and opposums.

Oh, Lydecker is F1, so stands to be interesting to watch for production but doing well so far.

It sounds by your values I need to try methley out then. The toka you speak of is acting similar to the toka I have and no fruiting yet. Which is F1 hybrid making almost all my plums F1 hybrids but one. Shiro is F1 and bulletproof. So my only plum not is my lydecker, sorry, after checking into this patent explaming this as not F1.

My pollinators exist as red leafed plum suckers from my neighbors yard, but the lydecker is far from there and needs me to carry pollen over to get fruit.

Thanks for that opinion!

11 hour later edit:

On waking up this morning I kind of realized my struggle last night about the question of *F1 x (P1 x P2) and why it would perform any better than **F1 for *lydecker vs **toka respectively. (yesterdays posting higher up) Then I took suppressive soils into consideration and further realized that even though both these plums were only 12 feet apart from each other the F1 toka was not planted in any previous place of a struggling apricot the the way my lydecker had been into the year after I had my hunza apricot die out at age 5+ right there. 

This suppressive soils idea (last link in #9 post different thread) is to me also evidenced by the fact that the immediate area where in Scotch Creek BC exists, they receive more rain than the standards of even Seattle, that an old man there I found had 2 apricot trees producing the natural way every year, being several years since talking with him.

At the time, and every year since, I had been exploring these places over the country for bird planted hybrids between North American bitter cherry and European sweet cherry, and these places around the BC creek area have fertile F1 hybrids between the two cherry species.

...And this would start to make sense that in order to have a fertile tree outlive another in our backyards then start to build you fruit tree in a place (such as I did w lydecker inadvertently) where you might be lucky having had suppressive soils.

The lydecker of mine was supported on american plum and since I am usually vacant from Vancouver in summers american plum shoots were always growing and dying off in the shaded position relative to the lydecker. ...the idea being that a suseptible american plum rootstock could feed and continue feeding the fauna in the suppressive soils for the benefit of the slightly more resilent lydecker plum in and in order for it to experience even more resilency. 

I have seen more and more cases without knowing it, one is the Vancouver PDX apricot growing near enough to some naturalized dying prunus virginiana chokecherries there, as one of these likely cases of suppressive fauna. These chokecherries seem to come from healthier populations around more arid Hood River Oregon locations and upstream of the river.

I have a plum tree with four different plums. Thought it would be fun to put something like a pleurry on it. Can that be done and are there plum scions at the spring show? (Peaches and cherries too perhaps?)

jekahrs said
I have a plum tree with four different plums. Thought it would be fun to put something like a pluerry on it. Can that be done and are there plum scions at the spring show? (Peaches and cherries too perhaps?)  

Only one of the pluerry^TM (cherry x plum) hybrids is Nadia and is the only creation not originating from California. Not to be confused with the cherry-plum hybrid (sand plum x plum) in the picture provided above by Ronald Lewis. As Daniel said these pluerry^TM hybrids are in all cases patented. This because they are the first time in history (eg. that by two people) true cherry has ever been brought together with plum. 

Note the registered ^TM trademark name for pleurry and this is registered by Zaiger in California. I have a 'sugar twist', a more yet exotic newbie in my yard from California consisting of 25% peach, 12.5% cherry. I might graft it to another plum outside if it ever proves unproductive in potted greenhouse conditions as I have with 'nadia' on plum per above (November 7, 2019 -12:10 pm). But I will never give these away at scion exchanges for the reasons Daniel already stated. 

Peaches have much less difficulty taking to plums as compared with the almost impossible real cherry / plum experiments. The best peach combination will be the lower part being a plum, the plum hybrid 'toka' as the interstem (per page 4 of 7, PDF), then finally your peach, the toka being the best found "all around peach-plum grafter", which has no patent. There is one interstem for sweet cherry with no patent that is 'adara' (prunus cerasifera plum). Although I have not seen it at our HOS scion exchanges I know there are other exchanges that do. 

Prunus cerasifera, is myrobalan plum, also sometimes referred as cherry-plum for the small cherry size fruit, but there is no basis with cherry other than fruit size. 

I do have 'toka' for the reason of grafting some curl resistant peaches to old plum trees but have not gone to that point yet.

Crankyankee said

Is this from winter temperatures?

It is our PNW prolonged cooler weather dampness that causes the damages.

In 2019 when I said "Everywhere my peach or nadia branches stick outside of the covered area those branches die-back" therefore do not apply exactly to that kind of stress than it is to our huge ebb of 'bacterial pseudomonas syringae'. If our thermometers ever drop below freezing it never drops below the critical tissue freezing events of around 0F and when days do go freezing it only helps dry the exposed branches. In effect freezing days give trees that are more stressed and susceptible by bacterial gummosis a shortening of the "prolonged cooler weather dampness"; and it only helps.

Freezing days have been known to work for the worse with some strains of bacterial gummosis, none of which I am likely to encounter here. Gummosis is more likely to overpower trees that have been stressed in the root zone, such as my potted roots, by root/trunk vole damage, root nematodes, or anything else very stressful to the tree.

In PNW (probably where you are too with other diseases) you never want to have just any ordinary plum rootstock in a pot unless it's all the way (including branches) in a greenhouse.

Rooney said

I have a 'sugar twist', a more yet exotic newbie in my yard from California consisting of 25% peach, 12.5% cherry.

Did you find a patent for Sugar Twist? I see where Dave Wilson is showing it as patent pending and I cannot come up with a patent that lists the name Sugar Twist so I am wondering which Zaiger patent is for Sugar Twist.

interspecific Sugar Twist (R)
(massive one year shoots on a 14 month ago purchase)

As usual for wide crosses such as this there may be no overlap with upcoming sweet cherry for 2021 like there was last year. But you never know.

How small is small?

Mine (nadia) is hard to know the answer because I grafted it high on an existing rootstock purchased way back from our old fairs. It is consistent in crops and it still hasn't been producing based on pollen I put on.

The formerly mentioned Lydecker could qualify to be updated too since as Ron lewis posted with picture one of this cultivars parents is identical to his (ie. western sandcherry). So Lydecker remains a small tree like sandcherry and zero DNA belongs to any true cherry. I have two cultivars of Lydecker purchases side by side and on american plum based on seeing tardy flowering from the rootstock. Just like this it is noteworthy for production east of the Cascades which is the location of my original purchase. The drawback for around here is only about two plums set and this year all my efforts to hand pollinate all the little starters dropped and has gone to zero. Further more the rootstock is actively coming up from the soil of the most proximal part of the tree which will always disappoint you. 

I forced good production on one branch by making a large plane of thick glass installation over one now giant branch. The plum is pleasant and productive this way. I got an email from the patent inventor which was intended for a contacts person that I know in Edmonton who trials fruit as well. The inventor has verified that Lydecker has no ability to pollinate other cultivars. So beware of this that this cultivar is now listed West of the Cascades now by a mail order retailer.