The Almond Doctor

I'm always pleased when I stumble across single-crop blogs. This morning's discovery is The Almond Doctor, by University of California Cooperative Extension Farm Advisor for Merced County, David Doll. Apparently there are 102,000 acres of almonds in Merced County, which is absolutely mindboggling! The focus seems to be primarily on pest and diseases, which gives it a very practical bent.

The Almond Doctor

Lanzones?

I was just perusing The Scent of Green Bananas, and came across this:

Name That Fruit!: Lanzones (Scent of Green Bananas)

I have never heard of these things, but I'm intrigued. Anybody know if these are available in the U.S.? Meliaceae is the mahogany family...

TSOGB is basically a food blog, but so fruit intensive that I read it semi-routinely, which is saying something because my tolerance for food blogs wears out pretty fast.

Another pluot link...

Just a quickie here...wanted to link to a pluot post by my friends over at the Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog:

What I did on my holidays: The Pluot (Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog)

Fruit in Korea

I never reported back on my trip to Korea, mostly, I guess, because I hadn't reported back on anything here in months until very recently. But rest assured that I did go, and I did come back, and I did eat fruit while I was there.

Most of what I encountered was not overly exotic, although I did get to try the bokbunja that was recommended in the comments. This is a wine made from Rubus coreanus the Korean black raspberry. It was tasted about like what you'd expect from a black raspberry wine, but with a more substantial kick than I'd anticipated. (Of course, it was followed immediately by a couple of beers at a noraebang, so that might have had something to do with it). I thought it was pretty good. Apparently it also helps with impotence and sexual stamina, though neither was really an issue on this trip.

We also had hallabong, a relatively expensive but very tasty citrus fruit grown primarily on Jeju Island. It's vaguely tangelo-like, released from a Japanese breeding program in the 1970's (they called it Dekopon, but the Korean ones are named for a mountain on Jeju). I've seen a couple variations, so I'm not 100% confident in the pedigree, but the most probable seems to be:

Hallabong = Kiyomi x Ponkan
Kiyomi = Miyagawa x Trovita
Miyagawa = Citrus unshiu
Trovita = Citrus sinensis
Ponkan = Citrus reticulata

(Citrus unshiu x Citrus sinensis) x Citrus reticulata.

(For those unfamiliar with the Latin binomials, sinensis is the sweet orange, reticulata is mandarin/tangerine, and unshiu is the satsuma or mikan.

Anyway, very good. Unfortunately, I didn't get any pictures of it.

I did however get pictures of jujube (from a street market in Suwon):


And some asian pears, apples, and kumquats:

(I don't know what variety of apples they were, but it seemed to be the same variety everywhere. I had one and it was pretty uninspiring).

And some strawberries (there's also a few oranges and melons hiding in there):

(This seemed to be the only way strawberries were sold in Korea–in big styrofoam boxes. I think these were mostly 'Chandler', but I could be wrong (I'm pretty sure at least the ones I ate were). There were a couple of flats that might have been 'Camarosa' or something like that. They were even more shameless than US strawberry packers in hiding the bad fruit under the good, probably because in an opaque container it's easier to hide).

Also, though not a fruit, I also sampled bundagi, silkworm larvae:

(I sampled some of these later, cooked not fresh, and wasn't too impressed, though my cousin told me the ones we had were not especially good ones...)

Plumcots vs. Pluots

Chip Brantley, whose pluot book I recently reviewed, has also recently penned an article on the distinction (or lack there of) between plumcots and pluots.

The Whole Truth About Pluots Versus Plumcots (Slate)

As I have mentioned before, I myself definitely favor "plumcot". I'm bothered by the idea of something trademarked becoming a generic term for something for which there is no real non-trademarked term, which would be the case if one insisted that plumcots are solely 50-50 plum-apricot hybrids (well, I suppose there's always "interspecific plum", but come on...). It restricts discussion and trade by people who don't hold the trademark, and it dilutes the trademark, so pretty much no one wins.

On a semi-related note, does anybody know the exact species make up of the "cherums" I've been seeing in the store? They've only come in big packages, so I haven't yet bought one, but they look pretty heavy on the plum side of things. I'd be stunned if some one could get any fertility of consequence in a cherry x plum hybrid without a bunch of backcrosses to one side or the other, but I'd be curious just which species they're working with. I'd wondered if maybe it was really a hybrid with the cherry-plum, Prunus cerasifera, but if you believe what little I've found online, it sounds like it involves actual cherries...

Mysticism and miniature fruit

I visited the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum the other day (which, although I had originally worried it would be a weird cultish experience, was a really cool, professional museum, easily worth visiting for those with an interest in ancient Egypt) and came across this row of dwarf pomegranates along one wall. I didn't even recognize them until I saw the fruit, which was pretty obviously pomegranate-like. It gave the cultivar name as 'Nana', but I'm now thinking that's actually a botanical variety, and so there's got to be a cultivar name that goes with it (assuming they weren't just seedlings).

Anyway, I was delighted to find an unusual fruit growing there, and snapped a few pictures:

Fruit photos...

I hadn't logged into my Flickr account in ages, but when I did tonight, I discovered I had been contacted by a user called "frutticetum". I don't know anything about Mr. (or Ms.) frutticetum, but I really like their collection of photos, which includes a number of pretty unusual fruits—Quinces, medlars, aronia, elderberries, many more:

frutticetum's Photostream (Flickr)

While I'm at it, I might as well link to one more. Spidra Webster is an occasional commenter (and I'm hoping still a reader) around here, and she's got quite a collection of fruit images on Flickr as well:

Spidra Webster's stuff tagged with "fruit" (Flickr)

Food Forward

Sarah Spitz, from KCRW, sent along a link to Food Forward, an organization which harvests fruit trees in back yards and other locations and donates it to local food pantries. This is a great idea...many people (hopefully myself included, now that I finally own a decent chunk of land) tend to have way more fruit on their trees than they or their family will ever eat. Really, if you have more than a few good sized trees and don't have a huge family or a love of canning or fermenting, a lot of fruit is going to go to waste unless you give it away. A nice cause, and a good way to share all the unusual cultivars you've collected with the world. (From the looks of it this is a Southern California organization, but I'm not 100% sure. It's still a nice idea to donate your extra fruit to a food pantry, even if there's no Fruit Forward in your area...)

Smoothie Quest

As much as I like to occasionally gripe about the selection of fruit in grocery stores, I have to say the number of interesting fruits in them has certainly improved in the last decade. My three year-old and I decided at dinner we were going to make smoothies tonight. We already had blueberries at home, and I had half a flat of strawberries from work in the car (I was planning an informal tasting of the five leading selections, which was cut short when one of my daughters wolfed down one clamshell's worth in a matter of seconds). So we headed to the store and went fruit shopping.

She made her old dad proud, choosing a really eclectic mix of fruits, each of which I sampled before dropping them into the mix:

Cherimoya:


Wow...I'd forgotten how much I liked cherimoya. The aroma is wonderful. And it worked really well in a smoothie. The only downside was digging out all those seeds (which are hopefully working on germinating right now...)

Honeydew Nectarine:


I had never heard of this before...and I really wasn't missing much. It tasted like a blend of really bland nectarine and underripe melon. It might not have been fully ripe, but the texture suggests it was close. Still, a pale yellow nectarine is interesting. (My picture is kind of washed out...oh well.

Golden Kiwi:


I've been seeing these for a while, but this is actually the first time I've bought one. Interesting that the shape and skin are so distinctive--if I had to guess, this is Actinidia chinensis, not the usual Actinidia deliciosa. It was pretty good, but nothing spectacular. It was a tad past its peak, I think, but it went into the mix just fine.

Manzano Bananas:


I really like these things. I probably should have waited for them to darken more (it does improve the flavor), but they're really good even at this stage. I ate one while I worked and gave the other to my daughter, so none made it in the smoothie (we bought some standard bananas too, which served just fine).

We also got blackberries (which my daughter had nearly reduced to smoothies already by the time we got them back to the car--she was enjoying shaking the bag vigorously), a nectarine, more standard versions of kiwi and banana, and an apple.

The smoothies were good and we got to discuss lots of different fruit species. How many three year olds do you know who can tell you all about cherimoyas?

(I didn't really have a point to this post, other than just basking in all the fruit I just bought).

The Perfect Fruit: Good Breeding, Bad Seeds, and the Hunt for the Elusive Pluot, by Chip Brantley

The Perfect Fruit: Good Breeding, Bad Seeds, and the Hunt for the Elusive Pluot Chip Brantley 240 pages Bloomsbury USA, 2009 List $25

What seems like an eternity ago, when I was still posting semi-regularly here, Chip Brantley contacted me about doing a series of fruit breeder profiles for his website, CookThink. Then a few personal crises intervened on my side, things got postponed, work picked up, and it never happened. But in the course of our conversation he mentioned that he was writing a book on pluots. I thought this was a pretty cool idea--there aren't many decent books on stone fruit, and certainly not on pluots specifically, and I said I'd like to read it when it was done.

That was probably a year ago. I'd honestly kind of forgotten about it. When you talk to serious fruit enthusiasts, you'll find that an awful lot of them are writing books about fruit. I think it comes from reading too many books about fruit. (For the record, in keeping with my obligation is a fruit fanatic, I'm writing a book, on grape breeders, or at least I was until my hard drive crash ate about half of it. I have to say my enthusiasm has waned a bit since). But anyway, I didn't necessarily expect that I would ever see the pluot book.

But I have to give Chip credit: not only did he write the pluot book, but he remembered my interest in it, and a couple weeks ago a copy appeared in my mail box.

I haven't been so pleased with a fruit book in a long time. It's not because it's the perfect book on pluots. I'd have written a very different book on pluots: more species info, more chromosomes, more history, more Luther Burbank. My book would have been twice as long, and it would have had lots of photos and tables, and probably nobody but me and a handful of stone fruit breeders would have been able to stomach reading it from cover to cover.

Brantley didn't write that, book, and I'm glad he didn't. Because this book does something else that no other book I've read has really done, at least not as well, and that is to capture what it's like on the inside of the fruit industry. The pluot is important to this story mostly because it's the central theme, but it in a very real sense, it's not what the book's about. The book is about the people and the business that have grown up around stone fruits--the breeders, the growers, the shippers, even the grocery stores. But one could have written the same story about strawberries, or apples, or citrus.

When people ask me what I do for a living, the next question (if there is a next question--I get a lot of blank stares of incomprehension) is what it is I do all day. And I dutifully try to explain, which inevitably entails a long complicated explanation of what it is the company does and how I fit in there and then I notice they're either losing interest or have wound up with one of those blank stares after all. This book is that explanation, only readable and interesting. For the people I really want to understand the business I work in, I will be recommending this book.

But even if you don't have a fruit breeder in the family that you're seeking to understand, I think this is still an important book, because so few people really understand the machinery that stands behind the produce they buy at the store. There's a lot of ignorance and a lot of misconceptions about agriculture and about farmers (there's virtually no misconceptions about fruit breeders, because hardly anybody knows we exist, though we do occasionally get accused of genetic engineering).There is a lot more complexity to the stone fruit industry than probably occurred to most folks, which is probably really the case with most industries. And as we follow both the development of the pluot and the players on the stone fruit stage, of the shifting loyalties and million dollar gambles, we start to get a picture of the constant balancing act these growers need to perform.

I've had so many conversations with people in which the grower is cast as some evil profiteer who cares nothing about quality, gleefully foisting crappy tasting fruit onto the hapless customers and cashing his fat checks. Many people don't seem to realize that the vast majority of growers want to grow good fruit. They want a product they can be proud of, that they can feel good putting their family name on. Unfortunately, many are working within the bounds of a system that doesn't put much value on quality, where price is dictated by volume and convenience. It's also a system in which margins are often slim, and the grower who chooses to emphasize quality but doesn't find a way to get paid for it sometimes can't pay his bills at the end of the season. (And sometimes it doesn't matter what they do--some seasons no one makes money).

Stone fruit have suffered a great deal in the current system, though perhaps not uniquely so. I didn't think I liked fresh peaches until I was 28 and in grad school in Arkansas, and I actually tasted tree-ripe peaches. A good peach is just about as good as fruit can get. Same goes for plums. I haven't had a plum I truly liked from a grocery store yet, nor even from a farmer's market, but I've had plenty of good ones out of people's back yards. Mass producing food is inevitably a compromise, but the stone fruit seem to have been more compromised than most.

The book ends on a hopeful note, that maybe this system is starting to change, and the pluot is held up as an example of how things are shifting. And I hope he's right. Certainly store-bought pluots have raised the bar for stone fruit. But I'm still continually disheartened by how many people just don't notice. People who will happily munch on the nine-month-old 'Delicious' apple and not notice the distinct resemblance to damp cardboard, or buy boxes full of half-green strawberries. I think somehow some of these people just like the concept of eating fruit in some way completely detached from the actual experience of doing it. These are the people who have set the tone for a long time. We have crappy produce in our stores solely because people like this will happily pay a reasonable price for them. If the only fruit people paid money for was good fruit, then there would only be good fruit in the stores, and growers would be paid to produce good fruit. That's how capitalism works.

As I have said, it's not as technically or historically focused as many single fruit books are, which was initially a bit of a disappointment to me. (It's worth noting that the Washington Post's review, while positive, thinks he gets too caught up in "long tedious fruit genealogies", so much of this is probably in the eye of the beholder). There's not a ton of science, beyond a basic explanation of how breeding is done and a brief overview of Prunus. Nor does Luther Burbank, father of the plumcot and probably the greatest plant breeder ever, get his fair share, in my view. Instead the star of this story is Floyd Zaiger, probably the closest thing to Burbank alive today, who took Burbank's idea and turned it into commercially viable varieties. I've wanted to write a piece about Zaiger Genetics for ages, but for now you'll just have to settle for this article or the Dave Wilson's Nursery catalog of Zaiger varieties, always an entertaining read in itself.

Brantley's writing is engaging, occasionally humorous, and infused with passion for his subject. His excitement about pluots has that slightly unfathomable quality that I find all good fruit authors have. In the narrative of his pluot research, I can see shadows of my own journeys of discovery into various fruit. Not everyone will get that, I suspect. But I also suspect most people, even those with no particular interest in pluots, will be taken by the string of characters Brantley visits in the course of his quest. The book is a quick, easy, and rewarding read, and I heartily recommend it to any one who eats fruit (which I would assume is essentially any one reading this blog).

You can buy it from Amazon and Barnes and Noble, among other places.

"Organic" does not necessarily equal "good"

I was pleased to find this article in the LA Times today:

'Organic' Label Doesn't Guarantee Quality or Taste (L.A. Times)

This article nicely captures my feelings on the subject. I've got nothing against organic food. I eat a fair amount of it. A lot of it's pretty good. But you know what? A lot of non-organic food is pretty good, too. I bugs me to no end when people treat the organic label as though it's some magic talisman of awesome yumminess. It's just a label. A stunningly arbitrary label, actually. And one that doesn't take into account the vast majority of things that influence quality.

But I also have issues with the big company vs. small company bias lots of people, including this article's author, seem to have (but in the interest of full disclosure, I work for one of those big companies...though it's all relative--we're no Monsanto or Dole). In general, yes, big agribusiness has not done well by us in the flavor department (though to be fair, by constantly seeking to buy things for as cheap as possible rather than insisting on the importance of quality, we consumers have basically done it to ourselves), but there are many, many small farms that produce mediocre food too. And there are some big companies who produce pretty decent fruit.

Seedless guayaba

I am in Mexico at the moment, back from an amazing dinner of steak, wine, and assorted organ meats. (I am writing this from my phone so I won't be my usual wordy self). I was speaking with a Mexican colleage and friend, and he told me an interesting story of fnding a seedless guayaba tree.

Several years ago, he discovered that his sister-in-law had a tree which bore seedless guayaba. When asked where it came from, she said that she had bought some seedless guayaba from a street vendor in Zamora, Mexico, and in them she had found a single seed, which she had planted and it had grown into a tree which produced seedless fruit.

My friend and his wife started asking around whenever they were in Zamora, until one day they found a fruit seller who had once sold the seedless guayaba. But alas, he no longer had them. The man who had sold them to him could no longer provide them. But he gave directions to where the man lived.

They drove out to him, and yes, he had once had a tree which produced seedless fruit. But a few years ago it had started producing seeded fruit.

After a little research, the mystery was solved. Turns out, the formerly seedless plant produces no viable pollen. The transformation from seedless to seeded coincided perfectly with the first flowering of some other guayabas the man had recently planted.

When propagated and planted in isolation from other guayabas, it once again was seedless.

Not earth-shattering perhaps, but definitely cool.

(And look...I finally posted! Happy now?)

Carte de Fruit de la France

I don't have anything to add to this (which, like so many wonderful things I post, I found over at the Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog), but that doesn't make it any less cool:



In case you're wondering, no, I do not know French. So the title above was entirely made up. And yet Babelfish tells me it's correct! I feel all cool and polyglot today. I also translated several things at work into Spanish (a language I at least sort of know) with only a few minor errors.

Update: I just had a reader mention that he's trying to track down a copy of the map, so probably I should provide some sort of a link beyond a vague indication of what website I found it in. I found it here, and they found it here, and apparently they found it here, which I can't read on account of the aforementioned not knowing French issue, but it looks pretty cool.

Korean fruits?

I'm off to South Korea on Friday, for nine days, and would welcome any recommendations on Korean fruit I ought to try while I'm there. I know February/March is not prime fruit season most places in the Northern Hemisphere, but I'll try what I can. I've got a local guide, but he's not as fruit-centric as some people (such as me), so I don't want to miss something.

How do I get in on this racket?

Apparently a Japanese grower is raking in big bucks for gigantic strawberries:

Berries, $841 apiece (Rockhampton Morning Bulletin)

Now, granted, it's 841 Australian dollars...that's only US$540. But still...

80 grams seems like a big strawberry, but I've seen several selections that averaged close to fifty, so I don't think it would be hard to get a variety with primary fruits of 80 grams, and at $841 apiece, one could afford to harvest the primaries and pitch the rest.

The statement about fructose is, in my opinion, off base, though. Although there is a relationship between size and sweetness, it's not a terribly strong one. Plus, fructose is not the only sugar in strawberries--in fact sucrose generally accounts for around half of the sugars, and glucose is important as well.

Weed control by guinea pig?

Although I feel at least as fond of grapes as any fruit (they were the first fruit I studied), I must confess that most articles on wine kind of bore me, as they have a tendency to just rehash the same ideas about the same small set of varieties, while I would much rather focus on new varieties, or just drinking the wine.

Most of this is true about this article, however the image of eleven million guinea pigs patrolling a vineyard, along with a race of dwarf sheep, made me like it anyway:

Sauvignon strategies, some involving sheep (Financial Times)

Bananacasts

The Voice Of America has five podcasts/articles (I have no idea if the articles and the podcasts say the same things, as I haven't made it very far into either at this stage) on bananas:

Banana Mooted As Top Crop In Africa (1 of 5)
Disease Threatens Banana Industry (2 of 5)
Top Trade Lawyer Doubts Feasibility of East African Banana Exports to Europe (3 of 5)
Governments and Global Businesses Urged to Help African Banana Sector (4 of 5)
Sweeping Reforms Needed to Improve African Banana Industry (5 of 5)

I've thought a little bit about doing a fruit breeding podcast, but I'm not convinced it's worth the bother.

No more Ziziphus zizyphus?

Some of you may have seen this in the comments, but I figure I would elevate it to a more visible position. Reader Christopher Taylor (who, judging by his two blogs, is way more qualified to comment on systematics than I am) sent along the following article in response to my earlier story on the Latin binomial for the jujube:

Proposal to conserve the name Ziziphus jujuba against Z. zizyphus (Rhamnaceae) (Taxon)

As I have said before, my personal leanings in taxonomy are based solely on sentiment and entertainment value (though from an objective standpoint I can see the value of well-done taxonomy) so you know where I come down in this argument...

(Thanks, Christopher!)

Fruit Genetics Friday #8: Picking a Scab Resistance Gene

I know the title is a pretty bad pun, and not even that accurate. Sorry. Anyway, here's the bit about scab resistance I hacked out of the draft on the WineCrisp apple:

The Vf gene comes out of a selection Malus floribunda. The original introgression of the Vf gene (or genes, but more on that later) was done by Purdue back in the 1940's, and has been used heavily in breeding, including as a fairly early target of marker assisted selection (a detailed history of scab resistance breeding is available from Purdue. I'll hit the highlights here.)

There are at least seven distinct loci governing resistance to apple scab, each named according to the original source (the "V" is for Venturia inaequalis, the name of the pathogen):

Vf - Malus floribunda
Vm - Malus micromalus
Va - 'Antonovka'
Vb - Malus baccata Hansen's #2
Vbj - Malus baccata ssp. jackii
Vr - Malus pumila R12740-7A
Vr2 - Malus pumila GMAL 2743

There are distinct races of the scab pathogen, though, and they react differently to the different resistances. Race 5 overcomes Vm, for example, while Race 2 overcomes the resistance in some M. baccata. In 40 years of breeding, no resistance breaking isolate of Vf was identified, but towards the end of the twentieth century reports began to surface in Europe of strains which could overcome Vf.

As I hinted before, it's probably more appropriate to refer to the Vf locus, rather than the Vf gene, because the Mendelian Vf gene is in reality a collection of genes. (Although I use it as much as anyone else (probably more), the word "gene" is actually kind of a problematic one anyway--it's really better to use "locus", to refer to a specific point in the genome, or "allele" to refer to a specific sequence at that locus.) Sequencing showed the so-called Vf gene to be a cluster of four genes, Vfa1, Vfa2, Vfa3, and Vfa4. Clusters of resistance genes aren't uncommon and have been shown in lots of species--it may be the extra copies strengthen the resistance by increasing expression, or allow a broader resistance by having multiple versions. It's also possible that resistance alleles are more likely to evolve from duplicated genes, because the plant can better survive mutations in a gene it already has backup copies of. In this case, Vfa3 has sustain some pretty serious mutation, and no longer produces a full length transcript. Although the similarity among the remaining four led researchers to suggest that all activate the same defensive systems, Vfa1 and Vfa2 (along with the partial transcript of Vfa3) are primarily expressed in immature leaves, while Vfa4 is expressed in mature leaves. Of these, Transgenic apples transformed with each of these apples showed that susceptible varieties expressing Vfa1 and Vfa2 became resistant, suggesting these two genes are capable of conveying resistance.

The Vf locus was really one of the first fruit genes to really be thoroughly investigated and described, from its introgression from a wild species, description as a Mendelian trait, and detailed dissection on the molecular level. Although other source of scab resistance are gaining in importance, and molecular tools such as linked markers developed to improve their usefulness to breeding programs, the Vf locus remains possibly the most studied disease resistance locus in any fruit crop. (I'm just speaking off the top of my head...Anybody think of any other contenders?)

50,000 visits!

Just thought I'd note that the Fruit Blog scored it's 50,000th visitor today! (Or actually, it's 50,000th visit--I'm sure 10,000 of those are just me, over and over again, but I'm not going to quibble). Interestingly, the counter at the bottom doesn't register it...that thing has been out of whack with the internal numbers for a while. I should probably get rid of it, but I've gotten used to looking at it.

If you'd told me in 2005, when I started this thing, that I'd ever hit 50,000 visitors, I'd have laughed. That there's so many of you that want to read me random fruit-ramblings is both amazing and encouraging, and gives me hope that maybe I'm not quite as insane as some of my friends make me out to be.

I kind of feel like some sort of critical mass was accomplished in the last month or so--things seem to have really picked up in terms of traffic here.

Anyway, thanks again for showing up, and for all the contributions readers have made in comments and e-mails. See you at 100,000!

It's not as far north, but...

...it's a heck of a lot colder than London:

Don's Cold Hardy Citrus

Granted, they're not looking at grapefruit, but I'm duly impressed with anybody who can get an edible Poncirus hybrid. A very cool site, and a good resource for those interested in breeding cold-hardy citrus.

The site is set up in reverse blog fashion, with the new stuff on the bottom, which I find unreasonably distracting and odd.

(Todd Wert, a friend of mine from grad school, pointed this page out to me).

Also, here's a fun-looking citrus page in German, one of the users' pages from the forum page.

Anyone know of any more northerly grapefruits?

From the Home Citrus Growers site I recently discovered:

World's Northernmost Fruiting Grapefruit? (Home Citrus Growers)

Anybody know of anything further north than London (there's a claim for Porlock, but if you're going to make fruiting a criterion I think you have to actually ripen the fruit)? Really I think the UK is probably the only place with a shot at growing it this far north. I've seen some kind of citrus growing in a greenhouse in Iceland (I can't recall what it was) but I think to count it really has to be outdoors...where's the challenge in growing it in a greenhouse...even if it is an immensely cool greenhouse heated only by infernal depths of the earth.

Another honor from a site I've never heard of.

Actually, I think it's essentially the same site, since the same person e-mailed me to let me know about it.

Anyway, it looks like we're in the top 100 Botany Blogs, too (#13 this time, though again it doesn't really look like a ranking).

(I kind of suspect their both just scams to link to as many popular blogs as possible to drive up traffic on their own site, which is one of those content-poor places you stumble across when Googling and wonder if anyone ever reads. However, regardless of the motivation, I am once again in good company, so I'm rather complimented anyway.)

You think this blog is overly specialized?

Over and over again, outside of work, when I tell people about this site, their reaction is frequently: How on earth do you find enough to write about? At which point I could point out that I have on occasion gone months without posting anything, but the problem there is more one of being busy (sometimes) or lazy (more often) and not a lack of material. As any one who has actually had a conversation with me about fruits can attest, I never run out of material.

Still, it gives me a little secret pleasure every time I find a fruit blog more specialized than mine, especially when said blog is extensive and well-written. Granted that almost never happens. But here's one case where it actually did:

Adam's Apples

Adam writes exclusively about apples. In fact, he writes almost exclusively about apple cultivars, which he tastes, photographs, and describes with surprising regularity (several times a week, pretty much continuously since July). I've been meaning to post the link for ages but I don't think I have. Of course, I never remember what I've posted if I don't post it immediately after finding it, so for all I know I just post the same three links over and over around here. This one merits a link over on the side, as well.

Update: I've been digging through the archives at Adam's Apples, and came across this episode, which amused me:

The Adventure of the Scarlet Blush
Mystery Managed (The non-Holmesian conclusion)
Scarlet Blush, Conclusion (the more appropriate conclusion)

Now I'm thinking I need more fictional detectives around here.

Bizzarria!

It's not hard to see why they named it "Bizzarria":

The Bizzarria Story (Home Citrus Growers)

I've seen a number chimeral citrus specimens before, but I've never seen the Bizzarria before. Apparently it's a graft hybrid of a sour orange and a citron. (Another much less spectacular citrus graft hybrid, Citrus neo-aurantium, can be seen here.).

This reminds me a little bit of the account of the "Sweet and Sour" apple in Apples of New York. Described as a probable graft hybrid, this apple had ridged fruit, with the ribs green and the space in between yellow. When eaten, the flesh in the green areas is tart and acidic, while that beneath the yellow skin is sweet and sub-acid.

Update: The more I poke around, the more I realize that the Home Citrus Growers website is pretty nifty as a whole. I'll add a link in the sidebar, too.

Another Durian blog

Like all Durian websites, it's a bit odd:

Above Average: Durian Links and Information

Any fruit-related site that also works in a reference to Gigantopithecus is just fine by me.

Warning: This site will play music at you. Adjust your volume accordingly. I told you...the Durian people are odd.

The Native Papaw

Someone on the NAFEX list forwarded on this link to an online version of an old USDA pamphlet on pawpaws:

The Native Papaw (University of North Texas)

Stern's Medlar, Revisited

Way back in the Dark Ages of the Fruit Blog, back when I actually wrote long articles, I wrote an post on medlars, which mentioned Stern's medlar, aka Mespilus canescens. I've always been fond of Stern's medlar, mostly because I'm fond of outliers in general, and this thing is definitely an outlier.

The genus Mespilus has long been one of those single species genera, consisting only of M. germanica, the European medlar. So the discovery in 1970 of a medlar species, a hemisphere away from all other naturally occuring medlars, in Arkansas of all places, is certainly surprising. The fact that it exists only on one site, with only 25 individuals, that it only rarely flowers, and that it turns out to be triploid, are that much more unusual.

In fact, probably too unusual to be the real deal. A little while ago I had a great e-mail from Thomas Frothingham, who has worked with M. canescens, with an update on the latest thinking on the species. I'll repost it here verbatim, rather than just paraphrasing his whole letter for you:

I happened across your website today, and I thought I would pass along some information about the Stern's medlar. In a former job, I worked extensively with this species in situ, at the Konecny Grove Natural Area. There has always been controversy about the taxonomy of this very rare plant, but the latest thinking, based on the genetic analysis of the entire Crataegus tribe by Dr. J.B. Phipps [EFL: The paper is actually by Lo et al., not Phipps, though Phipps has been a prolific researcher in the field of Crataegus and Mespilus taxonomy], is this: the Stern's medlar is an accidental hybrid between The blueberry hawthorn (C. brachyacantha) and the European medlar, Mespilus germanica. I can send you the original article if you're interested. It seems likely to me that the germanica plants were brought to the area early in the 20th century, when there was an influx of immigrants from the area of the Czech/Austrian border region. The influence of these settlers is very evident today: the nearest community is the town of Slovak, there is an Eastern Orthodox church nearby, the nearest cemetery is named the Czech National Cemetery, etc. Also the area is still populated with people of Czech ancestry (the Konecnys, Orliceks, etc).

At one time the population of Stern's medlar was managed as one of the rarest tree species in the world. If the hybrid theory is correct, it may change that perception. On the other hand, the blueberry hawthorn is tracked as a species of concern, and has been extirpated from the Grand Prairie region of east Arkansas (the original prairie has been almost entirely converted to rice production). So the Stern's medlar is at least preserving some of the genetics of a rare species.

To answer some of the questions posted on your blog:

To my knowledge, the Stern's medlar is not available commercially. Any attempt to market it would have to take into account the ownership rights of the landowners (the Konecny Grove Natural Area is privately owned, managed through a conservation easement by a state agency. It is also not open to the public). The plant also has some limitations as an ornamental: the period of bloom is very short, and the flowers smell bad. It has so far proven impossible to propagate by cuttings or tissue culture, although I assume it could be grafted. The only reliable method so far is to carefully dig up the suckers from around the base of the parent plant. There are some specimens at the Center for Plant Conservation in Missouri, and also I believe at the National Center for Germplasm Research in Corvallis, Oregon.

The reason it hasn't bloomed in recent years is probably due to the succession process, as the canopy closes and the plants are increasingly shaded. The use of prescribed fire and removal of surrounding trees has been implemented to reverse this process. The other problem with managing this plant in the wild has been the presence of invasive Japanese honeysuckle and privet. These plants have been removed manually, which is very labor intensive. The last time I saw it, the grove was in good shape. This natural area is also the habitat for a number of other rare plants, and so it will continue to be managed carefully, regardless of the conservation status of the Stern's medlar.

It would be extremely interesting to replicate the original cross between the two presumed parent species-in other words, cross pollinate between a European medlar and the blueberry hawthorn. The seedlings from such a cross would presumably be Stern's medlars.

He also passed along a copy of the Lo et al. paper* (which I would be happy to share with any one interested). It's not the easiest reading, at least from my point of view (as much as I like taxonomy I find taxonomy papers mind-numbing), but buried in there are the evidences for a hybrid origin of M. canescens:

1. Nuclear sequence data showed M. canescens shared a recent common ancestor with the M. germanica samples, but chloroplast sequence was actually much more closely related to C. brachyacantha.


2. Stern's medlar shares many characteristics with C. brachyacantha that it does not with M. germanica: petals that turn orange upon drying, multiflorous inflorescences.


3. C. brachycantha occurs naturally in Louisiana, eastern Texas, and adjacent portions of Oklahoma and Arkansas. M. germanica, while native to Europe, is recorded to have been grown in Louisiana as long ago as 1893, placing the two species in close proximity of the only known site of Stern's medlar.


4. Both sexual (×Crataemespilus) and graft (+Crataegomespilus) hybrids between Crataegus and Mespilus. (I've discussed the general promiscuity of the whole Mespilus / Crataegus / Sorbus / Pyrus / Amelanchier club before).


5. There are a lot of reasons to reconsider Mespilus' standing as a distinct genus and include it in Crataegus.

They basically propose the following scenario for the origin of M. canescens:

• Sometime, probably 150-200 years ago, pollen from cultivated medlars was transferred to a flower of blueberry hawthorn, resulting in hybrid seed.


• The resulting seed produced hybrid individuals. However, because of differences between the parent species, meiosis was irregular and the hybrids were largely infertile.


• The only viable gametes produced by this primary hybrid would have been unreduced, and thus diploid.


• With these unreduced ova, occasional seed set might have occurred, and in those cases the pollen parent could have been either a medlar or another native diploid hawthorn (possibly red-fruited, like M. canescens).


• Stern's medlar is the result of these secondary hybridizations.

I have to admit they lay out a pretty compelling case, both for revoking species status for M. canescens (they suggest designating it Crataegus ×canescens) and for absorbing Mespilus into Crataegus. But my personal taxonomic system is based more on sentiment than on anything else, and I'm definitely a splitter, not a lumper. So I'm going to keep Mespilus, and I'm going to keep calling Stern's medlar a medlar, because it's cooler that way.

*Lo, E.Y.Y., Stefanovic, S., and Dickinson, T.A. (2007) Molecular reappraisal of relationships between Crataegus and Mespilus (Rosaceae, Pyreae)—Two genera or one? Systematic Botany 32(3) 596-616.

Transgeninc plants in Hawai'i: A new colonialism?

Hawai'i has the distinction of being the site of the first (and I think only) commercial trangenic fruit crop, a transgenic virus-resistant papaya. Without the transgenic papaya, there basically would be no Hawai'ian papaya industry. Even what little non-transgenic papaya production is left survives only by burying it in buffer zones of the transgenics.

Because of the level acceptance already in place for transgenic papaya, and probably because of the relative isolation of the island, Hawai'i is a popular plance for trials of transgenic crops. That's not real popular with some folks.

I'm a month late getting this posted, but Karl Haro von Mogel has a post on this up at Biofortified:

Hawai'i's curious relationship with with GE (Biofortified)

I can't remember if I've posted it before, but Karl's own blog, The Inoculated Mind is also worth a read.

#39 is good enough by me

Well, I know absolutely nothing about the website, but I'm not going to question anyone who ranks The Fruit Blog among the top 50 genetics blogs.

Even aside from the opportunity to brag about my honors, it's worth checking out, because there are some great sites there. Some, like Sex, Genes, and Evolution, John Hawks' Weblog, and Pamela Ronald's Tomorrow's Table, I've been following for a while, but there are a bunch of others in there that look absolutely fascinating.

(Considering they seem to have grouped them by category, I suspect the ranking is meaningless.)

New strawberries from the University of Florida

I added these to the "New Cultivars" section in the sidebar a while ago, but this is the first article I've seen on the new U.F. cultivars, Radiance and Elyana:

Safeguarding Strawberries (American Vegetable Grower)

I saw plants of both these varieties last week, and I was struck by how odd a plant 'Radiance' is. It's got sort of a soft, floppy look, like it's just slightly water stressed.

'WineCrisp' Scab Resistant Apple

The cooperative apple breeding program of Purdue, Rutgers, and University of Illinois (aka PRI) has a new release: Wine Crisp.

WineCrisp--New Apple 20 Years in the Making (University of Illinois)

I have a sneaking suspicion that the name is a thinly-veiled attempt to capitalize on the popularity of 'HoneyCrisp', but it's not like the University of Minnesota owns the concept of crispness I suppose.

The PRI cooperative has released a lot of varieties over the years, although probably the only one I ever saw with any frequency was Gold Rush (an interesting apple in that it is far better after months of storage than it is fresh, at least in my opinion). The main emphasis of the program has always been disease resistance, especially scab resistance. WineCrisp (and many other scab resistant cultivars) use the Vf gene.

I wrote up a whole big thing on the inheritance of major gene resistance to scab, but it got involved enough that I decided not to leave it attached to this, but rather to to A) finish it, and B) take advantage of actually having something written and available that fits as a "Fruit Genetics Friday" entry, so maybe I'll roll it out later this week.

Bramley's Seedling Bicentennial

Happy Birthday Bramley's Seedling--200 years old in 2009 (Fruit Forum)

There's even a collection of features and events in honor of the occasion (even what they claim is the first "video pie-cast").

Charlie is my Darwin

Over on ScienceBlogs, a fellow by the name of John Whitfield has taken on the task of "blogging" Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species:

Blogging the Origin (ScienceBlogs)

I don't especially want this site to become a debate of evolution, but regardless of your views on the subject, the Origin is still worthwhile reading, and of great relevance to the actual purpose of this site. It's a study of genetics before there really was much in the way of a field of genetics, and ultimately, it's a study of variation in living organisms--and variation is at the very core of fruit breeding. Darwin doesn't always get it his individual points right, but the man had an amazing eye for variation in nature.

(Darwin dealt more specifically with matters of domestication in a later work, and actually wrote an entire book on inbreeding, an important concept in plant breeding.)

I really like the idea of "blogging" books (Lady Evil Fruit absolutely loved Slate.com's Blogging the Bible) and I'd do it here except I'm too lazy and I don't have a particular book in mind...

A whole bunch (er, hand?) of banana articles

The New Agriculturist has a series of articles on African bananas:

African banana--on an upward curve (New Agriculturist)

Brought to my attention, as is so often the case, by the Agrobiodiversity Blog (they even threw in a bonus story on carotenoids in bananas...)

"Florida Grapes" website gone?

I was just clicking through my links, and I found two of them that don't work, which is always a bummer. One of them, Rare Fruit Online, is at least still available through Archive.org (you can find it here) but the Florida Grapes website appears to have disappeared along with AOL's Hometown web service back in October, and isn't archived on Archive.org. Nor does it appear to be in the Google cache. (If you'd like to see it not working yourself, click here).

This is a major sadness for a pedigree junkie like me, because the site was a great source for parent information, particularly the selections from the programs of two of the "Three Bobs", Dunstan and Zehnder.

From my contacts within the grape breeding community, I feel fairly certain that that information is still preserved somewhere out there. But still, it's one thing for information to be available somewhere in some one's notebooks or spreadsheets, and another for it to be one Google search away.

If anybody has the pedigree information from this site, I'd try to put it online somewhere myself.

For now, I'm pulling both links from the sidebar. (As a condolence, I'm adding the Bananas.org forums).

The most Mendelian of Mendelian segregation

This isn't really fruit related, but it is breeding related, so I declare it relevant:

Pea Breeding Project (Daughter of the Soil)

(I was inspired by the Agrobiodiversity Blog's mention of it, but I've been following Rebsie's blog for a while, so I'd have gotten around to it eventually.

'Ohio Everbearing' black raspberry

When I first heard about the 'Explorer' primocane-fruiting black raspberry, I was convinced it was the first such variety. As it turned out, I was wrong, as numerous such cultivars existed by the turn of the century, although very few ever achieved any importance.

An exception to this, however, is the very first primocane-fruiting black raspberry, 'Ohio Everbearing'. Although not a major commercial success, this variety remains significant as one of the very first cultivated American selections of Rubus, and probably the first named black cap (given the abundance of wild black raspberries, it probably took an unusual trait such as fall-fruiting to warrant a name and cultivation).

'Ohio Everbearing' was discovered in the wild by Nicholas Longworth. Longworth was a self-made millionaire banker from Cincinnati, which in 1804 when he moved there was almost the western frontier. Although his family remained important in local and U.S. politics, and he left an estate worth $10 million when he died in 1863, Longworth's most lasting legacy is as a horticulturist. Often called "The Father of American Viticulture" (a title sometimes applied to his correspondent, John Adlum), Longworth was an avid collector and disseminator of fruit varieties. He championed first the 'Alexander' and then the 'Catawba' grapes and introduced at least one strawberry of his own creation.

Everbearing Black Caps listed in Fred Card's Bush Fruits (1920) American Everbearing Cottier Everbearing [Grigg's] Daily Bearing Earhart Everlasting Every Day Fadely General Negley Hixon's Everbearer Kagy Everbearing King of Cliff's Lum's Autumn Black Raspberry Lum's Yellow Canada Miller's Daily Bearing Munson's Everbearing Mystery Ransom's Everbearing Sweet Home Wonder

Longworth found the original 'Ohio Everbearing' somewhere in central Ohio, where he had retreated in the fall of 1832 to escape cholera outbreaks in Cincinnati. Despite it being September or October, he "found a raspberry in full bearing, a native of our state, the only everbearing raspberry I have ever met with. I introduced it the same winter into my garden, and it is now cultivated by me in preference to all others, and my table is supplied from the beginning of June to frost." Although the variety struggled somewhat on the gravelly soils of his fields, it performed better on clay soils, and Longworth was convinced it might have a future, especially in England. He sent plants there, as did A.J. Downing, though it seems have had little impact there. The legendary Dr. Hogg did note its existence in England as late as 1884, when it was probably gone in the U.S. (Incidentally, in my hypothetical strawberry-themed band, my stage name was going to be "Dr. Hogg").

Longworth was among the foremost horticultural authorities of his day, and an everbearing variety of raspberry would seem to be a major development, so it seems like it should have caught on, but while he and a few others cultivated it commercially, it never seems to have. Black caps, in general, have never attained commercial prominence, perhaps because they were foreign to European tastes, and thus unable to compete with the more familiar red raspberries. Many other everbearers, such as 'Grigg's Daily Bearing', 'Miller's Daily Bearing', and 'Lum's Autumn Black' were selected from its seedlings. (Indeed, I rather suspect most, if not all, of those everbearing black raspberries that appeared in the second half of the nineteenth century may claim it as an ancestor. Most of these seem to originate in Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, or Illinois, the areas nearest the discovery and commercialization of Longworth's variety).

And while we're talking about obscure fruits with Z's in their names...

I recently came across this fairly thorough discussion of Syzygium species from the Philippines on the blog Market Manila, with the common names "makopa" and "tambis". The discussion features a number of photos and spans three posts:

Tambis / Makopa / Curacao or Malay Apple
The Tambis (Syzygium Aqueum) Chronicles, Take II…
Tambis & Makopa Side By Side…

I don't really know much about the Myrtaceae. I was reminded of these posts because Syzygium sounded kind of like Ziziphus, and had it in my head that the two fruits looked kind of alike (although not so much, now that I look at them again). I thought maybe they were related, but no, not remotely--they're not even in the same order.

Jujube jujube?

I just came across an interesting tidbit on the nomenclature of the cultivated jujube (mostly on an obscure corner of the internet called Wikipedia...)

Ever since I learned the jujubes were actual fruit and not just a type of candy, I've been using Ziziphus jujube as the Latin name (now, granted, it's not like the Latin binomial for jujube comes up in my daily conversation that much). Well, apparently I'm a little bit behind the times, because the name seems to have been Ziziphus zizyphus since 1882.

I personally am so easily amused that this alone would be adequate to entertain me, but the story of how it wound up with that name is kind of interesting as well. In general, tautonyms (those in which the genus and species names are identical), while permitted in zoological nomenclature (hence Gorilla gorilla and Iguana iguana) are no good in botanical names. However, this one skated by on a technicality.

It was Mr. Taxonomy himself, Carolus Linnaeus, who gave the species its first modern binomial, Rhamnus zizyphus, placing it in the same genus as the buckthorns. However, in 1768 Philip Miller (a late and reluctant adopter of Linneaus' binomial system) decided it was sufficiently different to merit a separate genus, and gave it the name Ziziphus jujube. Why he changed it from a 'y' to an 'i' is unclear--it might well have been a typographical error. However, the arcane rules of taxonomy dictated that because Ziziphus and zizyphus were the first validly published and described names, and were not actually in violation of the tautonym rule thanks to the spelling difference, and thus the appropriate name, so in 1882 the name was changed to Ziziphus zizyphus.

And yes, I realize I'm probably one of about three people who found that interesting.

Kid's version of the Endicott pear story...

Not real fancy, but still kind of nice. I can appreciate any attempt to get kids interested in horticulture. It held my two-year-old's attention for nearly a minute, which is about 45 seconds longer than almost anything else I've tried this afternoon.

A Tree Grows in Danvers (USDA-ARS)

Primocane-fruiting black raspberries, revisited

I was pleased to find a note in my e-mail this morning from Pete Tallman, developer of the 'Explorer' black raspberry. I mentioned 'Explorer' two years ago (have I really been at this that long?) as an exciting development in a crop in which very little breeding has been done (and, frankly, very little breed success obtained).

Unfortunately, 'Explorer' has not really been a success. I've seen it twice, both times under tunnels: once in Pennsylvania, where it had virtually no fruit and a powdery mildew problem, and another time in upstate New York, where the plants looked healthier but fruit set was still poor, though better. I was rather disappointed, as I'd been pretty excited about the thing.

Tallman's message today explains a big part of the problem: 'Explorer' is not self-fertile. Apparently his field featured things that flowered and provided adequate pollen at the right time, so the problem was never evident under his conditions. This fits with what I saw: the tunnel at Penn State where I saw it had, if I recall, only one other variety in it, while the one in NY, where it had at least some fruit, had several.

While unfortunate, this isn't entirely shocking, as self-incompatibility is fairly common among wild, diploid Rubus, and 'Explorer' is not far removed from the wild source of the primocane-fruiting trait that Tallman discovered. (Not surprisingly, the trait hasn't persisted very long in most commercial types).

Anyway, all is not lost. Tallman has selected another primocane-fruiting black raspberry, dubbed PT-2A4, which does pass the self-compatibility test, and has other desirable traits compared to 'Explorer'. As he describes it:

"Compared to Explorer, the PT-2A4 berries are larger, higher drupelet count, and smaller seeds. PT-2A4 holds my all-time record for a single primocane black raspberry at 3.82 grams. Admittedly, that's a max berry, not an average, but I gotta track something, and average isn't awfuly interesting. Maybe with a little fertilizer this year I could break 4 grams. Unfortuantely, PT-2A4 hasn't captured the reduced thorniness of Explorer, so there remains further breeding down the road to see if I can tie that trait back in again."

He also included a link to his website, which includes a page for PT-2A4.

New grape rootstocks from the University of California

Five new rootstocks from Andy Walker's breeding program at UC-Davis (cleverly named GRN-1 through 5):

New nematode resistant rootstocks for 2008 (Western Farm Press)

I was particularly pleased to see that GRN-1 is a hybrid of bunch grape and muscadine. Despite lots of talk about Euvitis/Muscadinia hybrids, there really haven't been many releases (I can only think of this and 'Southern Home', as well as maybe a few germplasm releases).

I don't know nearly as much about grape rootstock breeding as I do about the above ground part, but I always enjoy seeing how much wild material is used, and the completely different selection of species they're dealing with: V. champinii, rufotomentosa, monticola, rotundifolia, rupestris, and berlandieri, just in these five releases. Some of these (especially the first three) rarely if ever occur in the pedigrees of fruiting vines.

A new year and a new look for the Fruit Blog

Well, I know I've been a bit scarce lately...between the holidays and everything else my mind's just been elsewhere. But I made a sort of New Year's resolution to keep this thing going, so I sat down to write a new post...

...and instead I re-did the blog template. Hopefully everyone likes it. I don't really know HTML that well, and there are still lingering issues (expect tinkering here and there for a while). There wasn't really a grand vision or anything--I just started screwing around with things.

The first thing you'll probably notice is the second sidebar. I decided to do this because to put everything in the one sidebar meant that useful things frequently got buried way, way down at the bottom. I may have somewhat reduced the impact of this by interspersing the fruit watercolors (from the USDA collection), but I thought they looked cool, and they kind fixed my problem with the grey not going down to the very bottom of the page like I wanted. I know things are a little more cluttered now...but hopefully not unreadably so.

Probably the biggest addition is the "Books" section in the sidebar. These are books about fruit and breeding that I've found interesting over the years (I don't actually own all of them, but I do most, and I've at least looked at all of them). The titles link to their respective Amazon pages (although some are out of print, and so your only hope is going to be a used copy). In the interest of full disclosure: I am a part of the Amazon Associates program, and get a cut (a very small cut) of anything you buy through these links. I have mixed feelings about this, since I didn't create this blog with the intention of making money (and what a fool I'd have been if I had!). But I do have a few costs here and there (domain name registration, for example) and a couple of bucks would provide me a little more incentive to keep things going around here when things get slow. I've been approached several times about placing ads on the site, but I've always turned them down. This way I keep control of what gets advertised, and hopefully people find some interesting or useful books. (It's kind of a pain to set up the links, so I have to admit I didn't put a ton of care into their organization or selection. I'll keep adding and arranging this section over time. If you have any suggestions you'd like added, let me know).

Anyway, hope everyone had a happy holidays, and hopefully you'll be seeing a little more of me. Please let me know if the new layout has screwed something up for you, or if you hate it or would like to see other enhancements.

Update: I've checked the new template in Safari, two versions of Firefox, and Flock. I'll check it in Chrome and Explorer when I get to work on Monday, but frankly I don't hold out a lot of hope for Explorer...the site's always looked kind of crappy on it, and I doubt this made it any better.