Review of 35 Plum Varieties for Northern Backyard Orchards
Review of 35 Plum Varieties for Northern Backyard Orchards
By Mike Chase, with technical assistance from Bob Purvis
Article Overview
This article reviews 35 plum varieties for northern climates suitable for including in backyard orchards. It also includes notes about the nutritional value of plums, pollination, tree structure and pruning practices, and rootstock selection. It is hoped the comparisons of the various plum varieties will help the reader consider additional plums to plant this spring in their home orchard.
Why I Raise Plums
Plums are a fall-back crop for me. I would prefer apricots and peaches. But that would require a perfect world where it never frosts after the apricots bloom and no pests or diseases ever harass my peach crop and the trees live forever. Since I live in the north and can’t be free of late frosts terrorizing my apricot blooms or pests and diseases shortening the life of my peaches, I grow plums. To be clear, I do raise apricots and peaches, but I don’t depend on them because some years they disappoint. Plums don’t disappoint. With plums I know I will at least get a partial crop even if we get our predictable late spring frost because, maybe since my orchard is still quite young, pests and diseases haven’t encroached very much on my plum orchard.
I really ought not to be so negative as to suggest that plums are a second best. In addition to being sweet and flavorful, they have excellent nutritional characteristics that ought to push them ahead of my favorites, apricots and peaches. In addition to being a source of vitamin C that contributes to iron uptake, plums are high in potassium, iron, antioxidants, and soluble fiber.
Variety Selection Considerations for Backyard Plum Orchards
This article focuses on plum varieties for the backyard orchard. There are certain distinctives that set off a backyard orchard from a commercial orchard. First, usually for a backyard orchard one selects varieties for their taste, and not for their ability to withstand bruising associated with shipping to market (an important consideration when selecting varieties for a commercial orchard). It is desirable for plums in a backyard orchard to ripen over time and have multiple pickings over several days or weeks (also undesirable for a commercial orchard). It is also desirable in a home orchard to have a variety of trees that span the fruit growing season (i.e., early, mid-season, and late varieties). Since space is usually a consideration for the backyard orchard, one might select dwarfing rootstock (which lessens yield in a commercial operation) or consider grafting and budding as a way to have multiple varieties on the same rootstock, and thus conserve space. This usually involves the need to develop grafting and budding skills and locating sources for varieties of scions. It is easy to see that the criteria for selection of plum varieties for a home orchard and a commercial orchard can be quite different.
If you have space limitations but still want diversity in your plum orchard you can obtain scion wood locally from friends and neighbors or through a scion wood provider such as Purvis Orchard & Nursery 1568 Hill Road, Homedale, ID 83628-3517, (209)407-6781.
Evaluation of Varieties
During 2010 and 2011, I planted the following plum trees (E indicates early, M indicates mid-season, and L indicates late season): Bavay’s Gage (L), Beauty (M), Black Ice (E), Coe’s Golden Drop (L), Early Golden (E), Early Laxton (E), Empress (L), Ersinger (E), Friar (L), Gras Romanesc (M), Green Gage (L), Italian (L), Kirk’s Blue (L), Luisa (M), Methley (E), Monsieur Hatif (M), Mount Royal (M), Moyer (L), Obilnaja (E), Oullins (E), Parsons (E), Petite d’Agen (L), Pipestone (E), President (L), Prune D’Ente (L), Purple Heart (M), Rosy Gage (M), Satsuma (M), Shiro (M), Shropshire Damson (L), Stanley (L), Sugar (M), Superior (M), Toka (M), and Victory (M-L). Some bore in 2014, most bore in 2015 and all of them bore a nice crop in 2016 and 2017, the years covered in this evaluation.
Among the early varieties, the best, to my taste, were Black Ice, Methley, and Obilnaja. However, although it is nice to have an early plum, these are just not in the same league as the best of the mid-season and late-season plums. I will top-work portions of several of the early varieties this year to carry a percentage of limbs of other more desirable mid and late season varieties.
There is one early variety, the Oullins (also known as Oullins Gage, Oullins Golden Gage, and Reine Claude d’Oullins), that didn’t make it on to my short list in either 2016 or 2017 that I want to give a another look before top-working a portion of it, because it is very highly regarded in the UK and would make everyone’s short list there. In our taste comparisons the Oullins was ok, but not quite as good as others that made the short list.
There were several excellent mid-season plums on my short list: Gras Romanesc, Luisa, Monsieur Hatif, Mount Royal, Sugar, Superior, and Victory. Among these, it was really hard to pick a #1, #2, and #3. But I can say that everyone should have a Luisa, a Victory, and a Gras Romanesc. They are all #1, and if you have space you should have the rest on my short list as well, as they are as good or better than the early varieties that made the short list for early varieties.
There are also some really good picks among the late season varieties. I really like Kirk’s Bue (it was my grand champion in 2016—more on that later), Coe’s Golden Drop, Empress, Moyer, President, Petite d’Agen, as “got to have” plums for eating right through the first light frosts. I like the Bavay’s Gage as the best of the three gages I have. Stanley is also good, and like the Moyer, Petite d’Agen, and Shropshire Damson continues to hang after frosts and get sweeter. Actually, I had my eye on the Shropshire Damson, a tart variety, as a tree I would do a major top-work on this coming year because I’m not a fan of tart, at which the Damson excels (in all fairness it is a go-to variety for people making plum jam or chutney). However, if you let the frost work on those little buggers they become edible in late November. I had good eating on these during Thanksgiving week the past two years.
A note on “best” plums: There are several key characteristic on which plums can be evaluated (e.g., cold hardiness, typical yield level, fertility, stone cling, flavor style, color of flesh or skin, etc.). In our climate here in Eastern Washington all varieties cropped well, indicating adequate resistance to late frosts and adequate fertility with wild bees as pollinators. Stone cling characteristics varied but were not deal-breakers. To make my short list (best in season) the plum had to taste good to me, my wife, and a few friends that came by throughout the plum season to see what was new in our home orchard. Although “tasting good” is admittedly subjective, it did have three components for all of us and we were in substantial agreement on which would be “must have” varieties. The plum had to first, have flavor, second, have sweetness, and third, have at least a little juice.
A note on the effects of pruning and thinning on flavor: One of the factors sometimes overlooked on fruit taste is crop load. The Burchell Nursery website has an interesting note in its description of one of its European plums: “Good pruning and thinning practices must be observed to reduce the fruit load so that acceptable sugar content will develop.” When I wrote the first draft of this plum review based on the 2016 crop I raved about the Kirk’s Blue. When I tasted it with great anticipation this year (summer of 2017) I was very disappointed and considered the Kirk’s Blue as a candidate for top-working. What was different? It cropped lightly in 2016 (maybe 3 dozen plums), but very heavily in 2017 (I was greedy and didn’t want to prune as I should or thin as I should). The price? Poor fruit quality in 2017. Other things being equal, you improve the quality of a plum through proper pruning (reducing the number of flower buds) and thinning.
A note on the effects of refrigerated storage on flavor: When reading the descriptions of some plum varieties I sometimes run into a comment about “sugars improve with storage” and also about when to pick certain varieties. Since I have a plum orchard with so many plums coming on all the time I haven’t generally picked and stored plums. This year the wind blew nearly all of my heavy crop of Luisa on the ground. I picked them up (maybe 20 pounds) and put them in a refrigerator. I am not sure they improved in flavor, but they held really well and we enjoyed them for another 8 or 9 weeks. Next year I am planning to pick a couple of pounds of each variety at prime ripeness and refrigerate them to be evaluated at intervals to see if they hold their flavor or improve their flavor. My wife appreciates having an extra refrigerator on the back porch for my excesses, including late winter/early spring housing of my many bundles of scion wood.
Pollination
Here are the major pollination axioms for European and Japanese plums:
Rootstock for Plums
Nurseries do not always specify which root stock are used for their European and Japanese plums. However, if you have a special situation such as very cold winters or very heavy wet soil you might want to give attention to trying to find nursery stock appropriate for your conditions. If you are in Zone 3 or colder you will want to especially consider plums on either Krymsk 1, a semi-dwarf that is very cold hardy, or P. Americana, producing a full-sized, cold-hardy tree. If you are in Zone 4 or warmer, you have the options of nursery stock on St. Julian A (most widely used in the UK for plums and very widely used in the US as well); Citation, which produces a semi dwarf tree tolerant of heavy wet soil; Pixy, which produces a dwarf tree; Myrobalan (most widely used for plums in the US) for full-sized trees; Marianna (also full-sized with tolerance for heavy wet soil); and various peach rootstocks (also for full-sized plum trees).
Tree Structure & Pruning Strategies for Plums
General Distinctions Between Japanese and European Plums Most Japanese plums (and hybrids) can be approached with pruners in the same way one approaches peaches and apricots. Japanese plums typically set fruit on one-year fruit buds and require vigorous pruning to cope with vigorous annual growth. European plums, on the other hand, tend to be more like apples or pears, with long-lived fruit buds and much less annual growth than observed in Japanese plums.
Structure Options In general, if you are choosing between the widely used open-center and central leader structures commonly found in commercial orchards, you will find that all plums do well as open center trees. However, I have had pretty good success getting European plums to conform to the central leader structure as well. If you don’t want to use a ladder to pick your plums you can simply keep your open-center and central leader trees a little smaller than they might be in a commercial orchard.
Since a home orchard is not under the same kinds of constraints that a commercial orchard must deal with, you have a lot more flexibility in tree structure and spacing than might be practical in a commercial operation. You can use Richard Bird’s How To Prune Trees, Shrubs, and Climbers to give you some ideas about keeping trees small so they can be picked without a ladder. Consider especially the fan, bush, and spindle as ways to pack more varieties into the same backyard space. Another strategy is to plant three different plum trees in a large hole and train them out from the center of the hole as if they were the three scaffold limbs on an open-center tree. This unusual practice also places different varieties in close proximity for the added benefit of pollination. Similarly, three varieties could be budded or grafted onto a rootstock and trained as three scaffold limbs of an open-center tree, with the benefit of the proximity of pollinating varieties.
Further Reading
My favorite reference book on fruit growing is Michael Phillips’ The Holistic Orchard: Tree Fruits and Berries, The Biological Way. It has an excellent section on plums and covers many other general topics that apply to all fruit trees. When you purchase the book go ahead and add the DVD - it is worth the extra money.
Review of 35 Plum Varieties for Northern Backyard Orchards
By Mike Chase, with technical assistance from Bob Purvis
Article Overview
This article reviews 35 plum varieties for northern climates suitable for including in backyard orchards. It also includes notes about the nutritional value of plums, pollination, tree structure and pruning practices, and rootstock selection. It is hoped the comparisons of the various plum varieties will help the reader consider additional plums to plant this spring in their home orchard.
Why I Raise Plums
Plums are a fall-back crop for me. I would prefer apricots and peaches. But that would require a perfect world where it never frosts after the apricots bloom and no pests or diseases ever harass my peach crop and the trees live forever. Since I live in the north and can’t be free of late frosts terrorizing my apricot blooms or pests and diseases shortening the life of my peaches, I grow plums. To be clear, I do raise apricots and peaches, but I don’t depend on them because some years they disappoint. Plums don’t disappoint. With plums I know I will at least get a partial crop even if we get our predictable late spring frost because, maybe since my orchard is still quite young, pests and diseases haven’t encroached very much on my plum orchard.
I really ought not to be so negative as to suggest that plums are a second best. In addition to being sweet and flavorful, they have excellent nutritional characteristics that ought to push them ahead of my favorites, apricots and peaches. In addition to being a source of vitamin C that contributes to iron uptake, plums are high in potassium, iron, antioxidants, and soluble fiber.
Variety Selection Considerations for Backyard Plum Orchards
This article focuses on plum varieties for the backyard orchard. There are certain distinctives that set off a backyard orchard from a commercial orchard. First, usually for a backyard orchard one selects varieties for their taste, and not for their ability to withstand bruising associated with shipping to market (an important consideration when selecting varieties for a commercial orchard). It is desirable for plums in a backyard orchard to ripen over time and have multiple pickings over several days or weeks (also undesirable for a commercial orchard). It is also desirable in a home orchard to have a variety of trees that span the fruit growing season (i.e., early, mid-season, and late varieties). Since space is usually a consideration for the backyard orchard, one might select dwarfing rootstock (which lessens yield in a commercial operation) or consider grafting and budding as a way to have multiple varieties on the same rootstock, and thus conserve space. This usually involves the need to develop grafting and budding skills and locating sources for varieties of scions. It is easy to see that the criteria for selection of plum varieties for a home orchard and a commercial orchard can be quite different.
If you have space limitations but still want diversity in your plum orchard you can obtain scion wood locally from friends and neighbors or through a scion wood provider such as Purvis Orchard & Nursery 1568 Hill Road, Homedale, ID 83628-3517, (209)407-6781.
Evaluation of Varieties
During 2010 and 2011, I planted the following plum trees (E indicates early, M indicates mid-season, and L indicates late season): Bavay’s Gage (L), Beauty (M), Black Ice (E), Coe’s Golden Drop (L), Early Golden (E), Early Laxton (E), Empress (L), Ersinger (E), Friar (L), Gras Romanesc (M), Green Gage (L), Italian (L), Kirk’s Blue (L), Luisa (M), Methley (E), Monsieur Hatif (M), Mount Royal (M), Moyer (L), Obilnaja (E), Oullins (E), Parsons (E), Petite d’Agen (L), Pipestone (E), President (L), Prune D’Ente (L), Purple Heart (M), Rosy Gage (M), Satsuma (M), Shiro (M), Shropshire Damson (L), Stanley (L), Sugar (M), Superior (M), Toka (M), and Victory (M-L). Some bore in 2014, most bore in 2015 and all of them bore a nice crop in 2016 and 2017, the years covered in this evaluation.
Among the early varieties, the best, to my taste, were Black Ice, Methley, and Obilnaja. However, although it is nice to have an early plum, these are just not in the same league as the best of the mid-season and late-season plums. I will top-work portions of several of the early varieties this year to carry a percentage of limbs of other more desirable mid and late season varieties.
There is one early variety, the Oullins (also known as Oullins Gage, Oullins Golden Gage, and Reine Claude d’Oullins), that didn’t make it on to my short list in either 2016 or 2017 that I want to give a another look before top-working a portion of it, because it is very highly regarded in the UK and would make everyone’s short list there. In our taste comparisons the Oullins was ok, but not quite as good as others that made the short list.
There were several excellent mid-season plums on my short list: Gras Romanesc, Luisa, Monsieur Hatif, Mount Royal, Sugar, Superior, and Victory. Among these, it was really hard to pick a #1, #2, and #3. But I can say that everyone should have a Luisa, a Victory, and a Gras Romanesc. They are all #1, and if you have space you should have the rest on my short list as well, as they are as good or better than the early varieties that made the short list for early varieties.
There are also some really good picks among the late season varieties. I really like Kirk’s Bue (it was my grand champion in 2016—more on that later), Coe’s Golden Drop, Empress, Moyer, President, Petite d’Agen, as “got to have” plums for eating right through the first light frosts. I like the Bavay’s Gage as the best of the three gages I have. Stanley is also good, and like the Moyer, Petite d’Agen, and Shropshire Damson continues to hang after frosts and get sweeter. Actually, I had my eye on the Shropshire Damson, a tart variety, as a tree I would do a major top-work on this coming year because I’m not a fan of tart, at which the Damson excels (in all fairness it is a go-to variety for people making plum jam or chutney). However, if you let the frost work on those little buggers they become edible in late November. I had good eating on these during Thanksgiving week the past two years.
A note on “best” plums: There are several key characteristic on which plums can be evaluated (e.g., cold hardiness, typical yield level, fertility, stone cling, flavor style, color of flesh or skin, etc.). In our climate here in Eastern Washington all varieties cropped well, indicating adequate resistance to late frosts and adequate fertility with wild bees as pollinators. Stone cling characteristics varied but were not deal-breakers. To make my short list (best in season) the plum had to taste good to me, my wife, and a few friends that came by throughout the plum season to see what was new in our home orchard. Although “tasting good” is admittedly subjective, it did have three components for all of us and we were in substantial agreement on which would be “must have” varieties. The plum had to first, have flavor, second, have sweetness, and third, have at least a little juice.
A note on the effects of pruning and thinning on flavor: One of the factors sometimes overlooked on fruit taste is crop load. The Burchell Nursery website has an interesting note in its description of one of its European plums: “Good pruning and thinning practices must be observed to reduce the fruit load so that acceptable sugar content will develop.” When I wrote the first draft of this plum review based on the 2016 crop I raved about the Kirk’s Blue. When I tasted it with great anticipation this year (summer of 2017) I was very disappointed and considered the Kirk’s Blue as a candidate for top-working. What was different? It cropped lightly in 2016 (maybe 3 dozen plums), but very heavily in 2017 (I was greedy and didn’t want to prune as I should or thin as I should). The price? Poor fruit quality in 2017. Other things being equal, you improve the quality of a plum through proper pruning (reducing the number of flower buds) and thinning.
A note on the effects of refrigerated storage on flavor: When reading the descriptions of some plum varieties I sometimes run into a comment about “sugars improve with storage” and also about when to pick certain varieties. Since I have a plum orchard with so many plums coming on all the time I haven’t generally picked and stored plums. This year the wind blew nearly all of my heavy crop of Luisa on the ground. I picked them up (maybe 20 pounds) and put them in a refrigerator. I am not sure they improved in flavor, but they held really well and we enjoyed them for another 8 or 9 weeks. Next year I am planning to pick a couple of pounds of each variety at prime ripeness and refrigerate them to be evaluated at intervals to see if they hold their flavor or improve their flavor. My wife appreciates having an extra refrigerator on the back porch for my excesses, including late winter/early spring housing of my many bundles of scion wood.
Pollination
Here are the major pollination axioms for European and Japanese plums:
- Although a Japanese plum (and hybrids) will most likely need another Japanese plum blooming at about the same as a pollinator, some are self-fruitful.
- Although a European plum is most likely self-fruitful, some are not (e.g., most Mirabelles) and will require another variety of European plum as a pollinator blooming at about the same time.
- In general, crops are heavier for self-fruitful varieties if there is a pollinizer available.
- Pollination is really not an issue for a backyard orchard if you have lots of varieties spread over the early, mid, and late seasons so that there are several available sources of pollen for both European and Japanese plums.
Rootstock for Plums
Nurseries do not always specify which root stock are used for their European and Japanese plums. However, if you have a special situation such as very cold winters or very heavy wet soil you might want to give attention to trying to find nursery stock appropriate for your conditions. If you are in Zone 3 or colder you will want to especially consider plums on either Krymsk 1, a semi-dwarf that is very cold hardy, or P. Americana, producing a full-sized, cold-hardy tree. If you are in Zone 4 or warmer, you have the options of nursery stock on St. Julian A (most widely used in the UK for plums and very widely used in the US as well); Citation, which produces a semi dwarf tree tolerant of heavy wet soil; Pixy, which produces a dwarf tree; Myrobalan (most widely used for plums in the US) for full-sized trees; Marianna (also full-sized with tolerance for heavy wet soil); and various peach rootstocks (also for full-sized plum trees).
Tree Structure & Pruning Strategies for Plums
General Distinctions Between Japanese and European Plums Most Japanese plums (and hybrids) can be approached with pruners in the same way one approaches peaches and apricots. Japanese plums typically set fruit on one-year fruit buds and require vigorous pruning to cope with vigorous annual growth. European plums, on the other hand, tend to be more like apples or pears, with long-lived fruit buds and much less annual growth than observed in Japanese plums.
Structure Options In general, if you are choosing between the widely used open-center and central leader structures commonly found in commercial orchards, you will find that all plums do well as open center trees. However, I have had pretty good success getting European plums to conform to the central leader structure as well. If you don’t want to use a ladder to pick your plums you can simply keep your open-center and central leader trees a little smaller than they might be in a commercial orchard.
Since a home orchard is not under the same kinds of constraints that a commercial orchard must deal with, you have a lot more flexibility in tree structure and spacing than might be practical in a commercial operation. You can use Richard Bird’s How To Prune Trees, Shrubs, and Climbers to give you some ideas about keeping trees small so they can be picked without a ladder. Consider especially the fan, bush, and spindle as ways to pack more varieties into the same backyard space. Another strategy is to plant three different plum trees in a large hole and train them out from the center of the hole as if they were the three scaffold limbs on an open-center tree. This unusual practice also places different varieties in close proximity for the added benefit of pollination. Similarly, three varieties could be budded or grafted onto a rootstock and trained as three scaffold limbs of an open-center tree, with the benefit of the proximity of pollinating varieties.
Further Reading
My favorite reference book on fruit growing is Michael Phillips’ The Holistic Orchard: Tree Fruits and Berries, The Biological Way. It has an excellent section on plums and covers many other general topics that apply to all fruit trees. When you purchase the book go ahead and add the DVD - it is worth the extra money.