Pluot now fruiting!!!

[realfood]

Oh the excitement of picking my first pluot fruit and only 2 years after planting. It was an experiment to see if this exotic fruit, developed in California, would cope with the Glasgow climate.
Has anyone else grown it and how have you got on with it?

[realfood]

[goodlife]

I've got it but not fruit yet for another year at least ::)
Well...how did it taste..good enough for all that waiting..? ;D

[saddad]

What on earth is it...  ???

[goodlife]

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluot... ;)

[goodlife]

b***er.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluot.. ;D ..there..

[Digeroo]

Must have.  Where did you buy it?

[goodlife]

I got mine from T&M..they sell Flavour King variety.

[gwynleg]

Oh dear, looks like another purchase!

[realfood]

Yes, I got mine from T&M two years ago. The very sweet fruit has an intense flavour, mainly plum but with a hint of apricot.
Goodlife, did yours flower?

[Jeannine]

I bought some of these fruit last week and they were terrible, no tatse of apricot, just like big  tastless plums

I hope your homegrown are much better

XX Jeannine

[Vinlander]

I've a rather weedy pluot seedling that has taken 3 years to reach 1m - but the fruit it came from was delicious.

There are many pluots (or plumcots) depending on the mix of genes.

The ones I bought 3 years ago were mostly apricot with the extra juiciness of a plum - better than either - especially as they seemed to ripen off the tree (which is a huge advantage over pure plums - which don't).

Apparently crosses with proper plums/gages: P.domestica are impossibly because they are polyploids.

So, unfortunately all pluots/plumcots are hybrids with asian plums: P.salicina - which can't contribute much to the flavour of anything.

I've read there are some varieties with just a touch of apricot  - which are an improvement on asian plums by adding a little flavour and earliness - but fairly pointless for people like us who have tasted a proper gage from the tree.

I've been looking for the those 90%-apricot pluots ever since but they've never reappeared...

I'm starting to get the paranoid idea that people prefer bland fruit - or even worse that the suppliers are conspiring to train consumers to dislike flavour!

I'm hoping the good pluots reappear next year to prove me wrong.

Cheers.

[goodlife]

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Goodlife, did yours flower?
No not yet..my tree has some growing to do..it needs to recover from the bad 'haircut' that it received from the nursery...all branches were cut into 3in short stumps..it was just stump of the stem and lot of short sticks sticking out..
The tree did survive and has now put some healthy looking growth on..but I do suspect I won't see a single flower for 2 years yet.. ::)..so I just keep licking my lips and imagining things to come..

[brown thumb]

they look lush  yumyum

[realfood]

My homegrown pluot, FlavorKing, has very good intense flavour. There are many varieties of pluot, with different colours, size and no doubt flavour. So far I have never seen pluot fruit for sale in the shops.

[ajb]

I managed to get about a dozen fruit in July off my 4 year old flavour king pluot. I've been looking for other varieties since 2009 when I bought this one. Has anyone seen another kind for sale in the Uk? are they available from anyone other than T&M (out of curiosity, I've already bought a "spare")

[El Rabano]

Hot d**n!  I've only ever seen these in farmers markets in Cali; very exited to see that they will grow over here.  Thanks for that realfood!

[realfood]

ajb, glad to see that others have had some success with the pluot. Where are you in the UK? When did yours flower, and did it flower about 2 weeks before plums? Did you try hand pollinating?

[ajb]

hi realfood -

We're in Yorkshire.  It flowered earlier than every other plum, except for Asian plum Lizzie, which flowered about the same time - end Feb / start March.  It also just about overlapped with Mirabelle "golden sphere" which started into flower a little later. I dutifully got my little paint brush out and tried to pollinize with anything vaguely related that flowered around the same time!  Lizzie and Mirabelle were covered in fruit, so maybe it helped them out if nothing else.