54 Plums and Plum Culture 



There are buyers, too, who select plums solely on their 

 size, and the Americanas are not the biggest plums 

 known. There are instances on every hand, however, 

 to prove that the Americanas find a profitable market. 

 Many cases have come to my knowledge in which 

 they were bought in preference to Domesticas or Jap- 

 anese plums, and sometimes at a higher price. It is 

 merely a matter of growing good fruit and educating 

 the buyers to it. 



The Americana plums are very fruitful. In fact, 

 overproduction is frequently a grievous sin with them. 

 They often require extensive thinning. If this is not 

 given, the fruit is small and unattractive. And it not 

 infrequently happens that trees left unthinned kill 

 themselves with overbearing. Cases of unfruitfulness 

 are very rare, and are usually explained by lack of 

 pollination or other local conditions 



Many of the remarks made here concerning the 

 Americanas, especially as regards their culinary value, 

 their salability and their productiveness, apply also to 

 the other principal groups of native plums. 



The Americana group is burdened with varieties. 

 There are literally hundreds of them named and more 

 or less disseminated. Three-fourths of these could be 

 eliminated without loss. In fact, it would be a posi- 

 tive gain to pomology, as not more than one-fourth 

 of the varieties are really meritorious. Of the remain- 

 ing one-fourth, another fifty per cent, or more could 

 readily be dispensed with on the ground of close re- 

 semblance to other varieties. Indeed, it is easy to find 

 two to a dozen varieties so closely alike that the best 

 expert can hardly detect any difference. It must 

 come to pass very soon that many of the old varieties 

 will be discarded and the names forgotten. It hap- 

 pened so with the Domesticas and it will surely be the 

 case presently with the Americanas. 



