sapa cherry plum. one of the OG chums from 1908 in the same wave as Opata. Sapa means black. sand cherry x japanese plum. flesh is sweet and tastey, reminds me of a really good sand cherry, which if you haven't had is cherry/plum the way a chokecherry is. the skin has some zing to it like a wild plum, but I think the balance is good. I would prefer to eat them over pembina. very similar to sapalta and mustang, probably sapalata improved on the flavour of the skin, and size.

first crop of wild plums growing on this draft, it's a four year american wild plum old graft onto chokecherry. it's flowered the last two years, but needed a second genetically distinct branch added for pollination. Prunus americana is reasonably graft compatible with chokecherry, not every graft I've survived this long but success seems more related specifics about the tree like how hard it was pruned, did the growth harden off at the end of the first season. after the second year survival has been very high. here at least I'll get some plums to grow in the nursery, usually I have to travel to collect them.

canada wild plum. I collect seed from all around MB, here is a small accession with some amount of hybridization growing in the greenhouse. I'll keep these to grow out. an accession is just a plant growing from one specific source, you might keep track of it separately if you suspect there's some genetic variation that makes it different in an interesting way. for prunus nigra, I'm looking for trees that grow well in our sandy soil, hold up to the winter extremes, flower early, are true to type in their leaves and fruit. only by collecting seed from various places over time can I build up a germplasm that starts to represent this native plum tree, which is considered the best pollinator for hybrid plums, flowering heavily and lots of pollen, a good tree form with less suckering than american wild plum, and larger fruit.

wild plums, by september they'll developed a red and yellow color and I'll collect them for seed. This tree is a 25-30 year old seedling plum, in a small town backyard. all that I can say about it is that the fruit and leaves are typical for prunus americana, and given that hybrid cultivar plums have little pollen, it's very likely pollenated every year by another wild plum in a nearby yard. Seedling plums in a residential setting, in cultivation just like crabapples surely have some mixed bag of genetics, it could have small percentages of P. salicina or P. nigra in it, one hint is that it doesn't sucker profusely like typical americana. But as far as usefulness as a pollinator, and a rootstock, this sort of seedling can basically be called american wild plum, there is the phenomenon of segregation toward the wild phenotype - when you cross some plum with a wild one, you often get seedlings that look just like the wild one.

spring american wild plum grafts onto chokecherry. maybe six weeks old. I trim back most of the epicormic growth but not all of it, actually letting it reduce vigour improves hardening off for the first winter. #grafting