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Purplegirl

A sad sight... (need some advice)

Hi everyone,

I magically stumbled across three lovely heavily laden trees on a nearby disused railway embankment. One I am sure was wild plum, one definitely looked like Mirabel plum but the other was undoubtedly cherry plum Smile

The sad thing is the cherry plum, which was laden with fruit for the picking, had been brought down naturally (probably from the exceptionally heavy rain shower we had the other day).

I'd like to save this fine specimen and wondered what was the best way to grow one from seed. Do I just throw a few ripe plums around my garden and hope for them to take naturally? Should I remove the fruit, wash and dry the stone and then plant it like a cultivated seed?

Any ideas on how best to grow one in my garden would be really appreciated! Smile

Thankies
cab

You find where they have self seeded that they don't come entirely true from seed. Worth a go, but how about cuttings instead? Dunno about taking cuttings from Prunus genus though, Tahir is probably the man to ask about that.
beean

Most fruit trees are grafted, so the root stock and the top part aren't from the same tree.
If you take cuttings of the top bit, then you'll get a tree which is on it's own roots, as it were, which MAY make for a truely enormous tree, or may be very picky about soil /water/drainage, etc. Basically any characteristics controlled by the roots (size, vigour, soil preference, and the like) will most likely be different from the original.
If you like, try it and see (assuming the tree has very recently come down). But you might get a surprise at the end result.
tahir

cab wrote:
You find where they have self seeded that they don't come entirely true from seed. Worth a go, but how about cuttings instead? Dunno about taking cuttings from Prunus genus though, Tahir is probably the man to ask about that.


Well, we walked up our footpath yesterday, of the cherry plums we planted as part of the hedges only 3 had significant amounts of fruit on them, 1 was disgusting, 1 was OK and 1 was actually really nice. This is out of about 50 trees I guess.

I believe you need to either sow the seed now so it stratifies naturally or stratify it in the fridge and plant in spring.

Cuttings would take on any plum/damson/gage tree I guess (I'm thinking grafting onto a branch of an existing tree), or a rootstock, OPs the man for grafting. I'll point him here.
Purplegirl

Thanks for the advice so far Smile

No wonder these trees produce so much fruit if they are so unsuccessful at producing new growth from seed.
tahir

Purplegirl wrote:
No wonder these trees produce so much fruit if they are so unsuccessful at producing new growth from seed.


They produce trees just fine, it's just that not all fruit well.
OP

According to the Martin Crawford book, cherry plums can be readily propagated from seed. He recommends putting the seeds in warm compost for a couple of weeks, followed by 12-27 weeks in a fridge (i.e. stratification) then plant them in a seed bed - he reckons you'll get about 40% success rate. I have not done this with cherry plums, but it does work with plums in general. Martin Crawford also mentions that cherry plums readily cross-breed with sloes - which in the situation you describe is quite likely to have happened, so I would therefore go along with Cab's comment to some extent - although many cherry plums are self-fertile so you might find if you plant enough of the seeds that a good proportion will come true.

This time of year is also the ideal time to get a nursery to bud propagate - I think you can use almost any plum rootstock e.g. St Julien. This method effectively clones the parent plant so there will be no issues of ending up with a sloe cross.
Tavascarow

A lot of fruit seed is stratified with acid to remove the dormancy inhibiting chemicals from the seed coat (mimics passing through an animal/bird gut).
10% molar HCL for a day before stratifying as above will speed up & increase the germ rate.
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