Essential Stone Fruits
Adrian Baggaley continues his series on the varieties that he considers essential for the amateur garden by looking at plums and cherries and peaches and nectarines grown under cover.
Varieties of plums and cherries that I regard as ‘must-haves’ need to be easy to grow, crop well and have a reasonable flavour. Top of my list is the Ontario Gage, which I find has the true gage flavour, but considerably more reliable than many other gages. It is precocious in the extreme: fruit sets look more like grapes hanging together than plums. Harvest is at the end of July and onwards. In 2007 I picked the first fruits on the 19th of July, but unfortunately never ending rain ruined much of the crop. Flavour is excellent, although occasionally fruit can have a slight metallic taste, but not in the past two years. The only drawback to this variety can be its rather thick skin. However, plums with thicker skins can make the best jams - for example, Jefferson and Cambridge Gage make superb jam.
Ontario Gage is a self fertile variety, so in theory you may manage to achieve a good crop with no other variety in your garden. In Holland, Ontario Gage is grown under glass and the resulting large, high quality fruit attract a premium price.
The name Giant Prune should not put anyone off this variety. It is classed as an American cooking plum, but when well grown it certainly takes on a dessert quality. Its attributes are self fertility, large freestone fruit - as much as 4 inches in length - and hardiness. The blossom on my tree has stood 8-9 degrees fahrenheit of air frosts and still produced a crop. It harvests in the first week of September with me and is a regular cropper. To encourage cropping and quality pull down the branches to achieve a weeping habit, which will expose the fruits to maximum sunshine; good crops will also promote a weeping habit. Giant Prune is one of the few varieties that I would recommend for cordon culture - as an oblique cordon - although grown in this way it is definitely a culinary plum. I regard it as one of the very best for jam making.
Giant Prune, however, can be a martyr to die back (brown rot), which enters the blossom and infects the new growth, which goes limp and dies; this requires pruning out. The fruit is moderately susceptible to brown rot. Even so Giant Prune is top of the ‘must have’ plums.
I find dessert cherries so problematical that is difficult to recommend any, since they are so prone to birds, wasps and rain damage. The last two are only surmountable in my experience if you fan train the tree against a wall or fence and cover up all the fruit. Cherries need a dry climate as evident last year - 2007- when all my cherry crop cracked and went rotten due to the endless rain. Anyone with a greenhouse or poly-tunnel, however, could train a self fertile variety, such as Stella or Lapins as a fan on the dwarfing Gisela 5 rootstock.
The sour morello cherry is another matter. This makes an attractive feature for months trained as a fan against a wall or fence. It is not affected by rain and wasps make little headway with the copious amounts of sour juice, but netting against black birds is essential.
Apricots, mostly from North America, have been introduced thick and fast in recent years. The variety Tomcot, in particular, has established a reputation for itself, but to get consistent crops you require another year like 2006 for outdoor free standing trees: that is, a year with no air frosts in spring and two months of blistering hot weather in June and July - a rare occurrence indeed. Tomcot is being trialled as an orchard fruit in Kent , but for most of us it will need to be grown as a fan trained tree in the glass house, poly tunnel or against a wall. I find that fleece is required in all three situations at blossom time.
In my polytunnel I have two Tomcots as overgrown cordons, due to little pruning. The fruit needs to be picked on the day. Too soon and it is only culinary in taste, too late and it is nearly liquid, but spot on - heaven on earth - although only to be achieved if you grow your own. Tomcot ripens fully, which is not always the case. For many years I grew a Moorpark apricot which only ripened on the side facing the sun - the front of the fruit were dessert quality and the rear culinary.
My experience with peaches and nectarine varieties has been very disappointing . Nearly all the varieties that I have ordered have turned out to be something different from what they were meant to be and most of the Victorian ones praised by the old authorities seem to be lost, although Thomas Rivers’ Peregrine has stood the test of time and is still around. I am waiting for some of the new varieties that are emerging in other countries to find their way into English catalogues before deciding that any peach or nectarine is among my ‘must-haves’.
Adrian Baggaley
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