Spring Satin Plumcot

There has been a huge jump in interest in growing food at home, rather than just pretty flowers, and while vegetable growing can be rewarding, nothing beats growing fruit for big crops and long-term supply. No replanting every year – instead your trees grow larger and increase their crop year on year almost exponentially. If you are going to have fruit trees, it makes no sense to grow common varieties that you can pick up at the store easily. No, one of the great joys of grow-your-own is having access to something special and different – and top quality. So, meet the plumcot, a hybrid between plums and apricots, that never makes it to the stores, but taste like heaven, and is so sweet that kids will devour them. The Spring Satin Plumcot is one of the very best varieties, full of sweetness, with skin like a plum, and sweet soft flesh like an apricot – the best of both worlds.

The Spring Satin Plumcot is a deciduous tree that will in time approach 20 feet tall and wide, or a little smaller if pruned regularly. It produces heavy crops of 2-inch diameter fruits, carried in clusters of 2 or 3. The fruit has a smooth, satin surface that lacks the pronounced ‘fuzz’ of an apricot, but is not as shiny as a plum. It is dark red to near black, with a moderate blue-white ‘bloom’ on the surface, and looks, well, good enough to eat. The flesh is golden yellow, turning redder when it is fully ripe. You can pick and eat the fruit according to your taste. It begins to ripen between late May and early July, depending on where you live. If picked when still firm, it has a tangy flavor you will love if you like your fruit with a bite. The longer you leave it, the softer the flesh becomes, and the more sugary and sweet it is. When the fruit is fully-ripe it is one-third sugar, and as delicious and mild as an apricot. That is the stage where most children adore it. The crop ripens over about 2 weeks, and stores for about the same time, becoming riper as you store it. This means you will have enough fruit ripe at the same time for lots of baking and making preserves – plumcot jam, anyone?

Grow the Spring Satin Plumcot in full sun, in any well-drained garden soil. Summer watering during dry periods is beneficial, and plumcots are easy trees to grow. This tree is resistant to some serious diseases that affect plums, such as bacterial leaf spot and bacterial canker, so it is easy to grow, and vigorous. It does need a pollinator to develop a good crop, and we recommend planting it with the Santa Rosa Plum, which is an ideal pollinator, flowering at exactly the same time. The Santa Rosa Plum ripens its fruit shortly after the Spring Satin Plumcot, so they fit together perfectly to give you a long period of fruit for eating and baking.

Some pruning is beneficial, and you should develop your tree into a vase-shaped form. This means pruning to create a circle of 3 to 5 branches radiating out from an area between 18 and 36 inches above the ground. These branches should be spread out evenly, and if one seems to be growing more dominantly, cut back the end of it by a couple of feet. Remove any weak, damaged or crossing branches, and any new growth that comes at the base of the main limbs. When developing side branches, choose ones that make a broad angle to the main limbs, at 10 o’clock and 2 o’clock angles. Removing the tips from longer side-branches will encourage them to flower. Once you can see tiny fruits developing, remove as many as necessary so that each cluster has no more than 3 plums in it. If you don’t thin the fruit, they will be very small, and mostly stone.

The original plumcots were created in California, by the famous fruit breeder Luther Burbank. Although remembered today mostly for creating the nectarine, Burbank also created 100 different plums and plum hybrids. He used the Japanese plum, Prunus salicina, and crossed it with the apricot, Prunus armeniaca. This breeding took place in the late 19th century, and since then his original varieties have been used to make other, newer and better varieties. The problem with most plumcots –also known as the pluot®, is that they were bred for California, and they don’t do well in areas with colder winters (they flower too soon) or humid summers, like the southeast and parts of Texas. William R. Okie, a horticulturist at the Fruit and Tree Nut Research Center in Byron, Georgia, part of the US Department of Agriculture, wanted to develop a plumcot for the southeast. He began with trees at the Center which were hybrid plums (‘Frontier’ x [‘Queen Ann’ x ‘Santa Rosa’]), and collected seed from them, which had been pollinated by apricot trees growing nearby. He planted the seedlings in 1988, and in 1991 selected the best tree, one that was growing well in the Georgia climate, and that had delicious and beautiful fruit on it. During trials it was called BY88Z1092, which became ‘Spring Satin’ once the tree was released to nurseries.

Plumcots combine the best features of plums and apricots, and you will love growing ‘Spring Satin’ in your garden. These trees are always in high demand, so order now, while our stock lasts.