Flavor King inter-specific trees

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• Picking season: Late
• Self-fertility: Not self-fertile
• Flowering group: 1

Flavor King is a pluot® - an inter-species hybrid between a Japanese plum and an apricot. The plum side of the partnership is the more dominant one, and the general appearance and flesh are typical of a Japanese plum, as is the smooth skin.

The flavour is essentially that of an intense plum, but there is a sort of syrup-like smoothness that you don't normally find in a plum. The apricot seems to lend an almost gage-like flavour to the usual bland sweetness of Japanese plums, and there is also a hint of peardrop.

The stone is semi-clinging.

The blossom appears very early in the spring, and the flowers are a bit larger than the flowers of European plums.

Growing and Training

Flavor King is only really suitable for growing in the south and east of the UK, because it flowers very early in the spring - late February or early March.

Despite some claims to the contrary, Flavor King is definitely not self-fertile. It needs to be pollinated either by another pluot or by a Japanese plum variety such as Methley or Santa Rosa, or by an early-flowering cherry plum such as Countess. It is possible that common early-flowering hedging species such as Myrobalan (Prunus cerasifera) or Sloe (Prunus spinosa) will also pollinate it.

Flavor King is a naturally precocious variety and, assuming there are pollinator trees nearby, is likely to start fruiting in its second or third  summer.

History

Plumcots (which are 50% plum and 50% apricot) were first raised in California in the late 19th century by the famous horticulturalist Luther Burbank. However it became apparent that although they were easy to create through cross-pollination, the resulting trees were not particularly easy to grow commercially. In the 1980s Floyd Zaiger of Zaiger Genetics started breeding plumcots and then further crossing them with plums, and these more plum-like trees were much easier to manage in commercial orchards. He registered the word "pluot" to describe any inter-species plum/apricot hybrid which was more than 50% plum. Flavor King was one of the most successful of these new hybrids.

Incidentally, Flavor King is not a genetically modified or "GMO" variety. Like all pluots it is basically a plum-apricot cross which is then further crossed with another plum.

The variety name is sometimes mis-spelt as Flavourking in the UK.

There is also some confusion about plumcots vs pluots. Since Zaiger Genetics had registered the word "pluot", other growers came up with other names for plum / apricot crosses. For this reason Flavor King is sometimes (and perhaps incorrectly) described as a plumcot.

Flavor King characteristics

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