Large beautiful but, because of 3 weeks of regular heavy rains…TASTELESS. Ozark Premier plums.
Wil refrigerate in a frost free fridge to try and have some of the moisture sucked out and then will further cointer ripen.
Hoping, Hoping,
Mike
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The rain shouldn’t effect the taste, as it does with watermelons…
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I respectfully disagree, Ray. I have the same plums for several years. Drier years, they taste definitely sweeter than wet years. Same things to peaches.
I think @Olpea and @clarkinks have mentioned how rain, or lack of it, affects the quality of their fruit, too.
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In our area heat and lack of moisture improve the flavor of fruit.
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“Tasteless” as in a totally bland, diluted flavor profile. Like what happens when you get a Coke with ice and by the time you get to the second half and enough ice melted… you still recognize that it is a Coke but you don"t really want to drink it.
Mike
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For plums, my experience says it is sun and not water that makes the main difference. I manage plums on a few sites with lawn irrigation that keeps the soil wet all season and plums can get highest quality in these conditions, if there are plenty of clear warm days. Plums are the only species I manage that doesn’t seem to suffer from this excess water. Peaches and nects seem to suffer the most. Even with the cloudy weather, the quality of my plums this year is pretty good. Reema, Elephant Heart and Satsuma are coming in right now and I can share them with pride. Only the very best lit peaches have adequate sweetness and, of course, the nectarines that aren’t too deformed with cracks. However, they don’t inspire the ecstatic response that we fruit growers work so hard to create. As far as Ozark Premier, I only manage it on one site, and it seems to be pretty good, but it was hammered by yellow jackets so hard to ripen on the tree. I set up traps there yesterday for later ripening plums.
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Poor choice for sugar delivery anyway. 
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I still think that excessive water is not good for plum quality. Granted, such a condition would not bad if there is plenty of sunlight. That’s still an “if”. In New England, a lot of rain days appear to go hand in hand with plenty of cloudy days. (unlike where I came from where it could be a downpour for a hour and a clear sunny sky for the rest of the day).
Harvesting lot of plums that were full of watery taste recently was quite disappointing.
I don’t expect you to buy my anecdotal observations, but if a cloudy season has always also been a rainy one in your experience, and at sites I work where there is no variability in constantly wet soil but on years with more sun the flavor is vastly improved over cloudy summers, does my conclusion seem logical?
Don’t get me started on the effect of clouds and rain on tomato flavor. I’m in the camp that says most fruit tastes better when matured under warm dry conditions.
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What is normal flavor for Ozark Premier? This is first year for me and they taste like watered down Toka. It has that hint of banana.
Firm flesh which is sweet with some tartness with nice “plumie” flavor. If allowed to ripen more on the counter it softens up and flavor intensifiers some. The skin has a tart bite which is a good boost to the tartness which the flesh is lacking.
I am better at describing ideas and methods than flavors but … thought I’d try here and you are the unfortunate victim of my effort,
Mike
Yeah, it’s probably easier to describe flavor in terms of other flavors that people can relate to.
My Ozark and Howard Miracle seem suspiciously similar, so was trying to determine what their detailed characteristics should be. It seems like all these creamy, opaque flesh plums, like Toka and Superior, have a similar flavor profile. Unfortunately, there has been sporadic rain and no sun the past week, so the quality of my plums have been dropping off again. I’ll probably have to wait until another year to get a better comparison.
I planted an Ozark Premier last year. Spring was wet. On this second year, I noticed that the leaves are yellow. Should I spray with some iron to green them up. Thanks for any help available. AL
If the leaves are yellow, the tree is probably water stressed.
This can be aggravated by heat stress also. If you aren’t getting at
least an inch of rain/week, you need to water the tree, regularly.