One of the great joys of growing seedling fruit is not knowing what is going to be the end result. You are using a tree as you would find it in the wild in an untended situation and putting it in a planting and then hope for the best. The environment you have is different than its homeland usually. I had a lot of questions and doubts forty years ago when I did exactly that. I did not know about the beach plum. I knew it lived on a beach. I knew it was an east coast plant. That was it. The tentative feelings and doubts soon evaporated when I began to fruit these plants as unknown seedlings. This was a miracle to me. It was one of the easiest plants to grow and fruit with few problems. From the standpoint of sharing my discoveries to commercial fruit farming, it was not as fruitful. It was stuck in the hobbyist world. Wild plums are relegated to rootstock plants, tart jam makers and wildlife fruit. They are not the same species as Damson or Japanese plums. What you do have is a new fruit species rarely cultivated. This is the boat I am in today. It’s a good boat. It floats and I am moving forward. The fruit is heavy. It is delicious. People like it. But in the end the wild goose plum will remain the wild goose plum. The beach plum is from a beach on the east coast of the United States and the Mirabelle plum is from France.

The aspect of using seedling trees in commercial settings is not done. Commercial fruit farming starts and ends with varieties. All seedlings are worthless and a few are good and a few more are even better than the good. Only the best are cloned. The rest are destroyed. I was told by a commercial plant breeder once at Cornell Universty that it was a one in quarter million shot to find the right apple for naming and release as a variety. Similar chances are found in other stone fruits too. For me to say, you don’t need this, just grow seedlings is blasphemous and careless combined with a certain naivete mixed with stupidity. Yet with this ignorance I am toting around comes enlightenment in full display as now we have the full range of fruit possibilities all right in front of us. Now it is not patented nor can it be. Now it is variable. Now it is rich in flavors of all types. Now it is available to all who want it easily. A handful of seeds will make it happen. And yes, you can name and graft a few too. There is nothing stopping you.

Today I tell others of my “seedling tree where every plant is genetically different” philosophy to all of those who will listen. It makes it very easy because the plums have such wonderful flexibility and adaptibility.They are so easy to adopt and become part of our environment and diet. I am not doing this in terms of replacing clonal selections but as an adjunct to fruit growing to capture flavors and nutrition that the grafted varieties cannot get close to while at the same time eliminating pesticides and herbicides. This type of planting or orchard system is also different. My guess is it will take place outside of the orchard and fruit industry first. It will require a different model. It will be one that abandoned or retired pasture land can be used to highlight the value of these species exactly like J. Russel Smith author of Tree Crops: A Permanent Agriculture envisioned. This time people will have access to it on a broader scale. There will be some farmers who will champion this idea to its limits using processing ideas to create new flavors. Others can be employed in farmerless fields where there is no human caretaker. It will be the wild that will save the cultivated. It will not be a massive breeding program but a quiet one seed evolution of going from one to many without blinking an eye.