Bubblegum Toka Plum Tree

Also called the Toka Plum, you won’t believe how sweet and delicious Bubblegum Plums taste until you eat your first one, tree-ripened and delicious. The Bubblegum Plum tree is a fantastic variety to choose, for many reasons. Firstly, it has a wonderful spring display of fragrant creamy-white flowers, produced in abundance, and purple fall leaves, so you can grow it as an ornamental tree. Second, it is entirely self-pollinating, so you only need one. If you do have other plums, it makes a great pollinator for any variety of American or Japanese plum tree (but not European plums), producing lots of pollen for the bees to carry around. Third, it is cold hardy in zone 4, so it’s a great choice for northern gardeners. Plus, and most important of all, in August and September it produces big crops of good-sized purple plums with sweet, juicy, apricot flesh inside. Perfect for eating fresh, it is also terrific for baking and jam making, and plums are among the quickest fruit trees to give you a crop, within a year or two of planting, and they are easy to grow too. A fantastic variety, a hybrid between the American plum and the Japanese plum, introduced over a 100 years ago and still going strong.

• Delicious purple-skinned plums with apricot flesh
• Very sweet, juicy and delicious
• Perfect for eating, baking and jam making
• Spectacular spring display of fragrant, creamy-white flowers
• Self-pollinating, and a great pollinator for other plums too

Plant the Bubblegum Plum Tree in full sun, in well-drained soil that is best if it is also rich and generally moist. It grows in most soils, from mildly acidic to mildly alkaline. Although somewhat drought tolerant, for a good crop it should be watered as needed between flowering and harvesting. This is a tough variety, and doesn’t suffer much from pest or disease problems, regularly producing a good crop for you. In cold zones there is a risk of late frosts damaging flowering in some years. You may need to net your tree to prevent bird damage, but you can also just harvest before it is fully ripe, and spread it out indoors to finish ripening. Prune after flowering, to keep an open, vase-like form (this helps ripen the fruit) and remove about one-fifth of the length of the growth from the previous year, by cutting off the tip of those branches.