I "suckered" for several of these from Millers. They have extreme scion overgrowth seven years later, the stock trunk is half the diameter of the scion trunk now (the ones still alive that is; all the peaches died only the plums are left). And yes they do sucker badly. The plum trees are still healthy so I am hoping they will last awhile longer. If you want a true dwarf peach try Pumiselect rootstock. Otherwise just get a standard peach and summer prune it. Peaches are tolerant of huge amounts of pruning. Scott

From the Topic Heading: "Hi, can you use wild black cherry (P. Serotina) or choke cherry (P. Virginiana) as rootstock for commercial cherry varieties?" Ten years ago I tried grafting cherry and plum to P. Virginiana demisa. The truth is that plum works better than cherry. One of my successful plums has been fruiting for several years and still pushing lots of growth. All grafting was performed in my wooded P. Virginiana lot consisting of what is thought of as sibling seedlings rather than an underground generated population consisting of clones. One of (so called plum grafted on a selaction) was inserted as a side graft @ 4 foot above the ground of the tree. In and of itself is likely P. V. demisa due to it being a lot on the NE backdrop of Mt. Ranier where in mapping that the range of wild (sub-culture) could theoretcally exist. If I were to select some of any lower branches below the 4 foot and graft them to other species types (ie virginiana, padus, possibly serotina) then it should work; unless like in Konrad's case, the fruits end up smaller than normal. For me in as far as I could tell from the small fruited wild plum I was using the limatation I would doubt be ever recognized. My guess is that you conditionally can graft P. Virginiana to plums and amur cherry to cherry. Maybe even amur cherry can work with plums for little reasons that I mistakenly grafted wild apricot on amur as apparent by the shape of the leaf and they grew with great intensity that way the whole growing season, before manually taking them out. Another guess is that I think the problem Konrad brought up about smaller fruits is true because I read a report on the small fruiting Pyrus Betulafolia, and that it influences smaller pear fruiting to pears, although not always. When I started out these experiments my ending goal (since Padus is ferel in Fairbanks Alaska) was to find fruits that would graft to Prunus Padus. Of itself Padus being the close European synonym of our P. Virginiana ecotypes, also being graft compatible. For now padus and virginiana prove that it "is" possible "only" with plums. note: Through experiments by others -Virginiana and Padus to each other are recipricol graft compatibles.

Are you saying they are not compatible or are you asking if they are compatible? You are throwing me off with your question mark at the end of your statement.

You can eat unripe sand cherries. I wouldn't. Sand cherries aren't toxic when unripe, but they sure do make you pucker. The birds here sure like them, though. Any bush not covered with netting when they start to turn color gets picked clean fast.