Welcome aboard - and Happy New Year

It sounds like you’ve got the basics: “1 cherry, 1 fig, 1 plum and 2 apple trees.” And without labels or planting records it’s impossible (outside of genetic tissue cultures) to determine which varieties or cultivars you have until they ripen fruit…

Knowing their variety would be helpful if you have a pollination problem. In Beaverton, you’re likely surrounded by pollen sources, though the ‘lone cherry’ might concern me; cherries can be particular about pollinators…

Ornamental ‘street plums’ would likely do the trick for the lone plum; though I’ve got a variety so pollen-specific I’ve yet to find its mate/match! (Burbank Red Ace anyone?) Figs don’t need pollination, just sun & heat. It should be a treat to find ‘what’ it produces. If you have any questions as to varieties you can haul some specimens into our HOS “All About Fruit Show” in October to be ID’d.

Right now, you’d be best to consider pruning… Ever done any? …Beginners have a bad habit of removing fruit spurs - and too much of the ‘wrong parts.’ Has the landlord kept up on pruning? If the trees have what appear to be ‘trees within a tree’ growing straight up off their main limbs, he hasn’t. If they’re more ‘umbrella shaped,’ and productive, it’s likely he has…

But to correct poor pollination you’d definitely need to know what you’ve got. Otherwise, baring various dormant sprays… which I generally ignore, be patient. …Perhaps someone else might recommend basic dormant sprays, like copper, lime sulfur and ‘oil.’ --- But check with your landlord...

I have Red Ace that sets well. The nearest trees are Redheart and Shiro. Shiro has long been considered the all purpose pollinator for Japanese plums. It's about as reliable as any Japanese-type plum I know, too.

Lon,

Thanks; I’ve had a mature Shiro, with Satsuma grafts, about 35 feet from the Red Ace – and nothing~ The Shiro blooms earlier, the Satsuma even earlier… I’ve watched them close and the Shiro’s done blooming just as the Red Ace opens… I had read of the same combination for pollination, but it hasn’t worked.

I even had an Ozark Premier in-between the two… until it failed to consistently set fruit for a good decade, so I removed it. In fact, I’d actually bought the Red Ace to pollinate the Ozark Premier because the Shiro wasn’t doing it – the Ozark bloomed too late. And, though the Red Ace was “recommended” as a pollinator for the Ozark Premier – I recently learned they’re closely related and will not pollinate each other. What a waste of time and trees!

Searching… I can’t find my ‘file’ on this plum pollination problem… What I began to find with “Burbank’s Red Ace” was that Luther Burbank had basically been crossing, or inbreeding the same plums. Granted, “The best” of plums, but they all share a close relative, thus won’t pollinate one another. And, they’re all late bloomers, so it’s very difficult to find another ‘late bloomer’ (unrelated) capable of pollinating them...

Having planned on procuring any of the few cultivars I’d run across as (supposedly) viable pollinators for the Red Ace (I’d given up and removed the beautiful Ozark Primer I’d grafted as a baby...) before our next scion exchange, I’ll definitely need to find that short list! I believe a plum called “Purple October” may work… but not sure, and, I’ve never heard of it.

I may have mentioned that the largest ‘southern’ limb just broke off my Red Ace with the 30+ inches of snow we had… My plan: allow sucker growth from the ‘joint’ and the following year (spring of 2010) graft on those pollinators… then wait to see if that does the trick