I recently pulled up a 2 year old seedling from underneath a relatives old plum tree (over 25+ years old). The tree produces a large number of small yellow plums each year. What I would like to determine is whether this tree would be the Japanese or European variety. Is there any way to tell the difference?
If it was truly a seedling, it won't matter what the variety was, because seedlings of commercial fruit trees rarely resemble their parents. Plums also readily produce shoots from their roots, but these probably won't resemble the relative's tree either because plum trees are usually grafted on a different rootstock. Regarding differentiating between European and Japanese plums, I wish I knew how to do it. I thought that Japanese plums bloom and ripen earlier than European; but I have a graft of a Yellow Egg European plum (identified by the owner of the original tree) that blooms at the same time as Santa Rosa and ripens slightly before Santa Rosa, a Japanese variety. I hope that someone else knows the difference.
