For years Valor has been my staple late prune plum for a variety of reasons- excellent quality because of its potential to high sugar and good size, fairly reliable cropping from site to site, and its exceptionally long picking period- even on wet years, when ripe plums can't be left on the tree.

A long picking window can be a liability, however, because, with Valor, slightly soft ripe plums and hard unripe plums look identical on the tree, so to harvest truly ripe plums you have to feel each one in the tree to evaluate what's ripe to pick- unless you are processing them, in which case you can shake the tree slightly and gather what falls. It also limits each picking to whatever is ripe over a period of over a month,.which may not be helpful if you are using most of the crop for jarring- say, to make preserves.

Almost a decade ago I began growing Empress and I'm beginning to see some advantages over Valor in this variety. First and foremost, it bears much younger and probably more reliably than Valor. It is also capable of getting up extremely high sugar (as is the case with most prune plums- Stanley being the exception i know of).

Unlike Castleton, it's precocity doesn't come with a slow growth habit and it has larger plums than this variety that I've chosen as my staple earlier E. plum. I bring up Castleton because it has been my most reliable cropper of any E plum and Empress may be almost on par with it in this regard.

I will pay closer attention to the ultimate quality of Empress this season if I have the opportunity and if it is comparable to Valor it will assume a much more important role in my nursery.