Preliminary Variety Review of the Excelsior Hybrid Plum 2025

Описание: This is a review based on early season plums of the Excelsior Hybrid Plum (Prunus salisina X Prunus americana), 2025. Note that early season plums tend to be lower in quality because damaged plums tend to ripen first. There is another plum strain also called Excelsior which is a chickasaw (P. angustifolia) cultivar with mostly yellow skin. Both Excelsior strains are available online.

In terms of flavor, this variety is excellent in my view. It's kind of flesh, shot overly juicy. But I need to try riper to see how it holds up when super ripe. There is a complexity to the flavor which is almost wine like to prune dried like.

This strain has not been productive for me yet. This is the first year that I've gotten enough chilling hours for it to bloom properly. On days when it overlapped bloom time with nearby likely polinizer varieties the weather was cool rainy or very windy, meaning it didn't get good bee action those days. However, P. salisina X P. americana hybrids have a reputation for only being productive when a wild type P. americana is present as a pollinizer. My climate is too warm in winter for P. americana.

This has high potential for being a good plum strain for a slightly cooler climate where you can count on at least 600 to 650 chilling hours. Under those conditions, I think this will likely be earlier ripening than Methlie making this possibly the earliest ripening Asian type plum for many areas of the Deep South.

The tree is fast growing. I think that if it were on a robust plum rootstock like Mariana or N.C. McKibbem it would make a really fast-growing big tree comparable to Methley. I haven't gotten enough plums yet to guess and average size, but so far about 2 inches in diameter seems to be the max. They are definitely bigger than Methley on average.

So, in a nutshell, this is an excellent plum for a slightly cooler Southeastern climate than mine, but productivity remains unknown. Disease resistance seems to be very good so far. This strain seems to get more curculios than I get on the Robusto portions of the tree with the exact same spraying routine. This strain seems to split more than my other strains.