The pics were taken yesterday.
Coe’s Golden Drop is ripening. I’ve had several so far. Some had brix as high as 31 while the lowest brix was still at 25. Overall, a late season, very sweet, delicious E plum.
@lordkiwi → Well, I’m a convert now. Too bad I let mine get such bad form. Rabbits girdled it hard, then several shoots grew right above the graft union and I just let them go for a few years. This spring I tried to hack it to and open vase shape. It looks like a worn out, upside down wisk broom
Hmmm. I had my first harvest of a damson plum at the end of September on a small tree, somewhere in the neighborhood of 10lbs. While tart, it is also quite sweet – intense is the perfect description. I could eat them all in three days of undisciplined plum gluttony, but am going to make the best plum jam imaginable this week instead. I’ll get a brix reading before I start cooking.
They are on their way to becoming prunes. Very high sugar helps prevent them from rotting before dehydrating, but in CA it used to be standard to let the sun make the prunes that were harvested from the trees already dried. I love the taste of a partially dehydrated E.plum. Brix through the roof and a completely different taste experience from either a fully hydrated plum or a prune.
I get a fair amount of that, its one of the downsides of some Euro plum varieties. If you pick before that happens they are often not ripe. Under the skin it can be brown as it is turning into a prune as Alan mentions. It still tastes great!
Hello, we see this when there is alot of rain, my theory is the rain washes the waxy coating on the fruit which reduces dehyrdation. If the fruit are ripe they usually crack, but if unripe they get this. We see this on the Japanese as well as euro fruit. We don’t get the heat a lot of you do, but do get a lot of rain. One year the cambridge gages had this real bad with the whole fruit looking shriveled, but they were delicious and very green. I took them to the market to give out as a “ugly can be good” demo, one guy tasted one and bought the whole box.
Thank you for your response. That’s interesting. We had a lot of rain in the spring until mid summer. For a stretch, it rained every 5-7 days.
This is my first year having E plums and noticed this, I will keep an eye out for correlation between a lot of rain and an amount of shriveled plums. I have not seen it in J plums yet.
@alan, I had another shriveled Coe’s today. Brix was 30. In fact, several of Coe’s were between 29-31. The 31.5 yesterday was the highest, so far. It must be the variety. @scottfsmith has said for a few years now that it was a very sweet/good plum. I think planting it in full sun is also helpful.
I don’t have a lot of experience with Euro plums in my own orchard. I fruited Stanley last year for the first time (on a 10+ year old tree - think I had pollination issues early on). I was so disappointed, I tore out the tree to make way for raspberries I now want in that area of the orchard.
This year I fruited three Euros for the first time: a nice crop of small damson plums on a small tree - they are a fantastic sweet-tart delight; fifteen-20 pieces of what I thought was Mirabelle de Metz, collected at a normally varietal accurate CRFG scion exchange four or five years ago - likely a particularly astringent and mushy fleshed damson cultivar I’ll graft over next year; three fruits of M. de Nancy grafted onto the not M. de Metz tree three years ago - boringly sweet, but at least not balls of tannin.
I’ve got several other varieties grafted and growing, but am likely at least two years away from sampling any of them. After reading this thread, I’ll be on the hunt for two or three of the most celebrated here.