Cold Hardy Plums and Cherry Hybrids

mustang cherry, prunus 'jeffchum' in bloom. the fruit are similar to sapalta, slightly smaller and more stringent skin. I don't know for sure about the parentage, it's called out as something like sapalta x americana.. so if you planted seedlings of any cherry plums and selected for vigour, might get something close. this is a stock bush for cuttings, but this year now that we have more pollinators around it might be full of fruit, and those seedlings could be alright rootstocks.

plum orchard year three on chokecherry rootstocks with interstems. first time there's been a bloom with some wild plums mixed in, should be fruit.

american wild plum, and some juliette, bolshaya

nanking cherries are blooming, ahead of the wild plums and almost everything else. these and the haskaps, just as we've had a short amount of weather without frost. spring is a week late this year, will be interesting to see how softwood collection goes we might be a week later on it as well.

double flowering plums, just year old rooted plants and they're flowering in the bin while they wait to get planted out. I have thirty, so maybe put a dozen into pots for our fall sale and the rest into the ground for bare root next spring. this species of plum doesn't really make an edible drupe, it's a showy bush. I have a twenty five year old one that sprawls, never pruned and it's six ft tall and ten ft wide.

chokecherry as prunus rootstock for softwood production. double worked with interstems, this is a trial to root several hybrid plums from their softwood material. eurasia, delicate, kuban comet, mara, podarok st. petersburg. haven't heard of those? most are russian hybrids, some very complex. all seem to survive in zone 3, all have a good chance of growing as own root plum trees building on the success I've had with toka.

grafting sweet cherries, prunus avium onto pin cherry, prunus pensylvanica .. a few russian types, so far survived -40 a couple of winters.

manchurian apricot, it these trays four weeks now, just starting to stay warm enough at night to germinate. stored dry at around 10% m/c for 18 months in a fridge, then slowly increased moisture through dec, cold stratified jan-march with some damp vermiculite in the bags not soaking just damp, then into flats and kept watered. apricot (manchurian) have a high oil content and the seed kernels are sensitive to desiccation so I wasn't sure if they would make it. all were rattling in their shells! this slow rehydration process worked. cold nights in the greenhouse and often frost helps prunus finish stratifying

canada wild plums from 2023-24 - plums sometimes have a deep dormancy, if a percentage of your seeds don't germinate, store them until the next spring. These were sprouting just a few days after warming up above freezing, stored in our root cellar at around -1 to -3C (~30F) for the winter in a bag of damp peat moss. We do the same with other plums, walnut and butternut.

sweet cherry leafing out after a winter with a dozen nights at -38, max -40C. leningradskaja grafted onto pin cherry about five ft off the ground. it's short because I cut back 3/4 to save and regraft, didn't exactly expect it to survive. so fun to have some sweet cherry growing, added a dozen more grafts in this location including a couple other varieties

mustang on chokecherry with an interstem. flowering intensely, pretty sure this can pollinate other plums.

bench grafted plums, done kinda late in the season but maybe the timing will work. second photo is apricots on sandcherry, just finished them so i'm done bench grafting for the year. now just field grafting.. about 30 ea new plum, pear and apple varieties to graft out, just need it to stop raining for the weekend.

lee red and garrington chokecherry racemes, compared to wild chokecherry. You can see the flowers have a much wider spacing, and the fruit is larger.

cherry plum flowers. mustang, manor, sapa, sapalta, dura. any differences? maybe subtle ones, these are all sandcherry hybrids with various other plums. hopefully we'll have some fruit this year.

prunus americana grafts one year old flowering. excellent for pollinating other plums, easy to graft onto chokecherry. i'm getting about 90% take and winter survival on these, the later photos are grafts from 2022 with very heathy union and in full flower.

a few plums flowering with different timing. green elf, toka, mustang. and a single apricot flower on a new graft

sweet cherry survived -40C and leafing out. it's grafted onto pin cherry I wonder if that improved the hardiness. my bluetooth thermometer logged at least half a dozen nights -38 and a couple -40 last winter, everywhere i've researched says sweet cherry winter kills at max -35C. so fun to see it growing, today I grafted out more .

western sandcherry, possibly the reclusive hansens bush cherry. they tasted excellent. here they sprouted in the bag and are overdue to pot up, the pink stems are cool. leaves will be green in a couple of days.

canada wild plum stratified winter 2023 then again in 2024. the first year maybe 40% germinated, this spring the other 60%. this is why I like to keep large seeds in the bag until they start to germinate, sometimes the dormancy is so deep they need two cycles. I should note, every species of plum I grew last year did this, and I have left over bags of all of them sprouting. waiting to see if the same is true for walnuts.

a hybrid plum with some simonii in the parentage (25%) growing well directly on chokecherry coming into year 3. will be grafting more of this one out as a potential interstem, toka thrives on chokecherry (50% Prunus simonii) but it's basically too vigorous. search for the perfect chokecherry compatibility continues, eventually I'll write this trial up as a paper and just post it on my blog

nanking cherry plugs. they grew kinda good in a plug tray, thinking I'll do more this year and bundle them in 3 packs this fall, shrink wrap before storage for easy packing. deciding what to grow in a plug vs small pots vs bare root seems to just take experimentation

peaches, germinating in the fridge so ready to pot up. this seed source is identified as prunus davidiana, similar to Siberian peach.

interstem, bridging brookred plum onto chokecherry with a short section of toka

sour cherries just a few weeks old, collected from romance series varieties. these hybridized bush cherries are easy to grow from seed and in the upicks where I found seedlings to try they all had large fruit and were productive just like the cultivars.

Manchurian apricots, sprouting in the fridge at 120 days stratifying so time to pot up. they don't need the shells removed, which just fall apart when ready. excited because these have good genetics. from a local zone 3 apricot orchard where a named cultivar was selected. time to plant our own apricot grove. and use for rootstocks.

nanking cherries, potting up sprouty ones from the fridge. If this was april I would be doing them in the greenhouse, so trying these little plugs to see if they can hold on for a month in them. maybe I could have kept them in the fridge a few more weeks? probably better to plant now, they were ready after 4-5 months of stratification, for sure if you're new to this and the seed start to grow in the bag then it's a good time to plant. #seedstarting

nanking cherries under lights at 21 days, some getting their 4th set of leaves.

western sandcherry from some tasty ones I found last summer. about one month old. we're growing these out to plant in the landscape and also for dwarfing apricot rootstocks.

nanking at 4 weeks. wow they grow fast inside. outdoors the various stresses slow them down, under lights or a very controlled greenhouse environment the plants get some momentum

two trays of canada wild plum, the first one (and the one full of trees) started early may, and the second one started early april, spotty germination. letting plum seeds have a good long cold stratification period through until may is a better result. the april tray may all germinate eventually, but if they need more cold time in cold strat the seeds may stay dormant and get saved for next year.

plums just let germinate in a bag of peat moss in the shade, pulling out the sprouty ones to pot up. I had an air prune bed planted oct 2022 and this spring (18 months later) keep finding new seedlings in it, I suspect the bed froze too hard to fully stratify them being above ground and not well insulated, so last winter I went with stratification in a fridge or root cellar and that gives the seeds a longer period above freezing. plum can need longer than most seeds maybe up to 5-6 months or even a warm period followed by cold, or even two cold cycles / winters. So in the bag until they germinate for this spring to monitor.

double flowering plum, Prunus x blireiana is a cool hybrid with japanese apricot. this is a bush I planted in 2004 at our old farmyard, neglected and never pruned it takes on a spreading low bushy shape.

plums seeds planted fall of 2022 decided to germinate, surprised to find them hidden in this grassy bed so quickly potted them up.

does this Id seem right? dwarf russian almond? growing in zn 3, always to excited to find a new Prunus species. found it growing in an old garden bed at my farm, overlooked I thought it was something else until wow the purple flowers set it apart.

triple worked graft. choke cherry rootstock -> toka interstem -> mustang cherry flowering, second interstem -> apricots just grafted. mustang and last photo is sapalta flowering, unlike other plums these cherry plum hybrids like to flower just one year after grafting.

Juliette cherry, a bush cherry with an interesting parentage. We signed on to propagate these with u of sask over the winter.

plum flowering on chokecherry. the bag has an americana branch for pollination #plum

attempting to graft swedish Leningradskaja sweet cherry onto pin cherry. It’s zone 4 hardy, maybe even 3/4. I have some slightly sprouted scions so wrapping in foil to keep the sun off. #grafting

plum grafting in my trial block of chokecherry. a short walk through some of the grafts with interstems that are waking up, with many positive results. this week I’m adding more cultivars, and trying some manchurian apricots, which will be using 2 interstems. choke cherry -> toka -> mustang -> apricot.

canada wild plum collected in the wild from a seemingly isolated population. maybe non hybridized, a great plum pollinator.

attempting pin cherry, Prunus pensylvanica from root cuttings.

been preferring z graft as a variation of the modified cleft on larger stumps. this is Prunus americana on Prunus virginiana.. will take some better photos. If I just wait a couple of weeks these can be bark grafts, which are super fast and fun… I’m out field grafting daily for a few weeks until I run out of scions or things to graft them onto ;)

first signs of spring, red elderberry and chokecherry buds swelling

red leaved chokecherry after three months cold stratifying starting to germinate

red leafed choke cherry seedling emerging

root grafted prunus onto mustang cherry and some Nanking cherry this morning. I woke up and realized that I could probably trim the roots from small stock trees that were just potted up - to use up left over scions in the fridge and rest this method of grafting on prunus. The source plants are just leafing out and won’t be harmed by the pruning, they’ll get extra watering. Does root grafting late in the spring work? I don’t know, I suspect the trees will need this season and next year in a bed to get up size. Some combinations trialing are Manchurian apricot, prunus maackii (Manchurian cherry), cherry plum, double flowering plum (Prunus × blireiana), American plum, and various plum cultivars onto mustang cherry and Nanking (prunus tomentosa) roots. Grafts were like a reverse modified cleft, this seems the most practical for root grafting. whip and tongue is only possible with thick material, otherwise roots just break. Success is one of the possible outcomes! #grafting

top working chokecherry this week. I have so much of it here, working to develop it as a resource with some in house propagation methods. One of my goal this summer will be to use this method to grow out softwood and trial many prunus species and cultivars for softwood rooting potential. Another one is budwood production for July grafting. #grafting

toka plum interstem for cherry plum on chokecherry stock. trialing toka and a few others as interstems. #grafting

chokecherry buds started to swell today in zone 3b southern Manitoba, they’re the first trees I’ve seen start to wake up. this gets things rolling for a grafting project, I have a pile of scion wood to trial on chokecherry for compatibility, and about 50% is going to have an interstem that proved compatible last year. There’s 2 goals: 1. to find all compatible prunus on P. Virginiana, and to use them as interstems to make this prolific rootstock work for cultivars plums and other stone fruit around our property and to document the compatibility for others. 2. Developing a system to rapidly grow out cultivar softwood from limited scion material for rooting under mist. own root plums, cherries, apricots

our air prune beds for American plums and acorns. these were level to the top in the snow last week, it’s melting fast

One of my grafted Toka plum trees top worked onto choke cherry, start of July last year. #grafting

Cherry blossoms at #highpark #highparktoronto #highparkcherryblossoms

bark grafts work well on larger stock and later on in spring when the bark is slipping, it just pos apart in a satisfying way. This is Toka plum on choke cherry, before it was wrapped up. #grafting #fruittree #fruittrees #graftingfruittrees

Patterson pride plum grafted on wild choke cherry three weeks ago. We’re running an experiment to see which varieties are most graft compatible and following up on them over time to learn if this can be truely viable for a cold hardy and prolific rootstock. #grafting #graftingtrees #plumgrafting #chokecherry

Saskatoon vs choke cherry. these two trees can be hard to tell apart, but this time of year the saskatoons / service berries have silver tips and the choke cherries have enlarged green buds pulling away from the branch. The saskatoons will flower and fruit earlier (June berries). #permaculture

grafting plums to wild rootstocks all week. The prunus virginiana are just about to lead out. Selecting only vigorous growing trees with 12-36” of growth last year. #grafting #prunusvirginiana #graftingplumtrees #fieldgrafting #permaculture

Cupid cherry blossoms, this one trained as a small tree although it’s more common to prune them as a bush cherry #cupidcherry #cherryblossom

Mount Royal plum just coming into leaf. Slowest plum to wake up this spring, and after our winter I was surprised it pulled through #mountroyalplum #backyardorchard #fruittrees

grafting plums onto wild choke cherries #grafting #chokecherry #backyardorchard

prunus virginiana in flower this week #chokecherry #blossoms

think I got all the Japanese garden elements going on with this cherry flowering over the new pond. It’s a work in progress. #japanesegarden #wildlifepond

prunus leafing out. started grafting a few days ago, we’re just waiting for trees to wake up and show a little green #plumtree