One thing nice about Shiro plum is that if you have a wide tolerance and appreciation of your palate is that you can enjoy the fruits of Shiro plum for much longer, spanning the usage in about two months from the time that you can use them.

As soon as the fruits develop a shiny luster, they can be used and are delightfully tart, something like a yellow-green tomato and wonderful to use in fresh salads. As the season progresses, the shiro plum changes its colors into yellow green when it has some balance of slight sweetness and tartness. As the season progresses, it becomes sweeter as the color changes to bright yellow orbs. They hold well on the tree.

Then it starts to shrivel as it nears the yellow orange color and starts to turn bitter. But then, before it gets really bitter, it would have been two months of usage already.

One of the very good plum wine comes from Shiro. I had excellent harvest way back in 2006. Shiro plum makes very clear fruity wines that are golden. Turning it into wine is one way to literally keep the Shiro plum last longer if not forever. The longer the better, if the ABV is 14% and above.


By joereal at 2008-02-19


I made two cases of wine last 2006 and down to just 6 bottles. I have a new batch from 2007 harvest that could make another two cases but will bottle them this Christmas. And if you happen to be in the area and contact me, I could have your name on it.

I ordered two 4x1 fruit cocktail trees from Raintree nursery and on each of them the Shiro plum was the only graft that survived. I don't know if I was doing something wrong, but I now have the shiro plum tree planted in my yard. It's a Marianna 2624 rootstock, but idea of what fruit family this belongs to and what I could graft onto it now? Previously, it was a Shiro Plum, Victoria Plum, Frost Peach, or Harglow Apricot.

Phillip

You can graft burgundy, beauty, sierra, elephant heart plums to it and they should do well in your area.

Again, this is site and management specific answer, compounded by palate preferences of an individual person. If your water irrigation is not correct, plant nutrition is off balance, and your harvest timing is not right, you could get bitter tasting or off-flavor plums. And obviously each one of us has our own taste preferences.

One of the biggest problems of taste test scoring is that differences in the timing of peak flavor, it would favor some cultivars over the others if you taste them at the same time. You can do something about this by storing the early producers as best as you can to preserve their peak flavor while waiting for the late season crops. But anyway, those are just some of the problems when comparing.

So, for me, I truly appreciate the crops on their own merit, with their own peak time flavor.

As I have indicated, even within one cultivar, the flavor could morph from one type into another as you let them stay on the tree, just like the Shiro plum. The same with most of these plums and pluots.

Another such example is the Beauty plum. I have commented that it was insipid in some years, but when I truly observed it for a series of time by keeping them on the tree, there was a point that it truly tasted outstanding as claimed by DWN. It is one of the earliest plums to ripen, but then you will have to wait for a series of heat wave in early summer, then it will make dramatic improvements in flavor, from the tasteless insipid slightly sweet watery juice into fully packed sweet flavor with some sprite unto it. But if you are in a maritime climate that never gets the 90's heat wave in early summer, you can forget this cultivar.

Burgundy is also excellent tasting at its own peak. The reason why I recommended it is that it is an excellent pollenizer for most other plums, especially pluots.

Elephant Heart has consistently complex flavor, it is an old favorite of mine. I though all plums are bitter in the US, having bought only from the stores, but when I taste tree ripened plums from my sister's yard in Fresno, way back in 1991, I was blown away. I never bought plums from grocery stores again. That is my early bias why I always liked this plum.

Sierra has been used in many other hybridizing programs of new plums and pluots. It has also excellent flavor on its own peak.

So for me, such questions are very complex to answer in all honesty. I like them all when their flavor peak in their own time, and enjoy them one peak time at a time.