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Welcome to the summer edition of our newsletter, which this year seems appropriately titled. I hope the fine weather lasts, and that you can sit down with a cool glass of apple juice while you read on.
Plums and related stone fruits
 Plums, peaches, apricots, nectarines, cherries and almonds: these are all closely related fruit plants. So closely related in fact, that they can even inter-breed, so you can now get pluots and apriums (plum/apricot hybrids). But that’s another story.
Peaches are native to China, and most varieties are quite similar to eachother. Nectarines are a type of peach bred to be hairless, but they are otherwise identical. Most peaches are self-fertile, and I have seen nice peaches grown to maturity in a sheltered outdoor garden in Cahir last summer.
Plums and apricots are very close. There are American, Oriental and European species of plums. The European domestic plum is thought to be of recent origin, as its seeds were not found under the ash of Pompeii. It must be a hybrid, as there is no known wild form. Green gages are a sub-division of plums, and the variety Opal is one of these. Needless to say, they are not all green. Damsons are also plums. Many plums grown in California are oriental species rather than European. Plum varieties suitable for Ireland include Opal, Victoria, Tzar, Avalon, Excalibur and Valour. The normal rootstock is St. Julien A, which gives a medium sized tree, but a new type called VVA-1 gives a smaller tree suitable to modern gardens.
Apricots are native to China and Siberia. They were introduced to Europe about 2000 years ago, but are not grown in Ireland.
Cherries can be divided into sweet and sour groups. Sour cherries seem to have originated from a single crossing of two sweet cherries. They grow wild in hedgerows in Ireland, and fruit well here, though the taste is quite sour except in the hottest of years. Sweet cherries originated between the Black and Caspian seas, and were probably carried to Europe by birds. They can be grown in warm locations in Ireland, and new rootstocks that give rise to small trees have recently been introduced. The best of these is Giesla5, so if you want a small cherry tree for your garden (less than 2 metres tall), this is the rootstock to choose.
GMO’s
In response to the article about genetically modified plants in the
spring issue of our newsletter, I received a note from Richard Auler, one of Ireland’s pioneering organic farmers, and he had an additional point to make. He said that the reason that negative effects on human health from eating GM foods have not been reported in scientific studies, is because no long-term study has ever looked for this type of effect, focusing on the plants rather than human health effects. I am glad to pass on Richard’s comment.
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