Random news bits from the Royal Horticultural Society

Anyway, as may be apparent to you by now, I'm just sort of posting any vaguely interesting fruit-related news that I've come across in the last few days. The following is an assortment of news from the Royal Horticultural Society (in the U.K...I suppose probably other monarchies have Royal Horticultural Societies as well..).

RHS News

Two bits of fruit news in there (I can't link specifically to them or I would):

- The Iford Cherry, an obscure Prunus species with an odd sprawling habit, has been rescued from extinction by grafting the last living bit of the only known trees onto sweet cherry stocks.

- Ken Tobutt, from East Malling, has a successful apple/pear hybrid. I know at least one person I correspond with will be excited about that.

Winemaking in Florida

Florida is not an easy place to grow grapes. It's too wet and too hot for most of the standard cultivars, and the spectre of Pierce's disease is an ever present danger. Even the 'Blanc du Bois' vine next my house, bred for Florida, is constantly being devastated by some pest or malady. One way around all these issues, however, is growing muscadine grapes. Muscadines are natives to the American South and cousins of the old familiar grapes, belonging to the species Vitis rotundifolia, and are set apart from the rest of the grape genus by the fact that they have 40 chromosomes, rather than 38. They're also rather distinct in taste and texture, though quite a few people like them for it.

Anyway, my reason for mentioning them is that I just happened across this blog dedicated to them:

Muscadine Musings

I haven't decided whether it merits a place in the sidebar, but there's a fair bit there (including the entire Wikipedia article on muscadines...ugh.)

Turkmenbashi's Fruit Extravaganza

I must admit that there's something of an inside joke going on here, but this is still a crazy amount of trees to plant:

Turkmenistan Announces Tree Planting Initiative

Three million trees annually? Wow.

I'd be curious to know the state of fruit breeding in Turkmenistan. A fair amount of interesting work went on in the former Soviet Union, and many of the resulting cultivars are only now beginning to see the light of day here in the West. I don't know anything about Turkmenistan, though.

They do have a dictator who amuses me to no end by being a living caricature of the ridiculous Eastern dictator (Granted the amusement is tempered a bit by the fact that he's a brutal, horrible, despot.)

How King Tut Got So Funky

Apparently it was white wine:

White Wine Turns Up In King Tut's Tomb (USA Today)

Actually, it was white and red wine, but mostly white. The fact that some of it was labeled as coming from a vineyard near Alexandria makes me wonder: Was it 'Muscat of Alexandria'? The cultivar is undoubtedly ancient, and Egyptian, so it's a distinct possibility. I just think it's tremendously cool that through the wonder of vegetative propagation, we can eat virtually the same grapes and drink virtually the same wine as King Tut (okay, probably the wine-making is a little different, but still...) I wonder if there's enough residue to do DNA testing?

Another fruit blog!

Correy Edmed, of Daley's Fruit Tree Nursery in Australia, was kind enough to e-mail with a link to their (apparently new) fruit blog. There are short posts up already on jackfruit, a passionfruit hybrid (I've been meaning to write a Passiflora piece here for ages, but like many of my other plans, I can't seem to get my act together), and growing coffee, and I look forward to seeing what else he has to say in the future.

The blog is, of course, linked to Daley's Fruit Tree Nursery, but while I'm sure they'd pleased if you bought their plants, it's clear that there's a real love of fruit, not just a desire to sell you stuff, behind it. I will admit to not knowing tons about the Australian nursery scene, but I've been aware of Daley's for a while and have always found them to have a fairly interesting and impressive catalog (I even linked to it a while back, in the post on medlars.)

I'm going to throw the link the sidebar, so it'll be there if you lose it.

Green Mangoes over at TSOGB

Santos has a mango post over at The Scent of Green Bananas, and it even includes a pair of recipes:

Oi, where did all the green mangoes go?

I'm far too lazy to actually make anything from a recipe 99% of the time, but I'd still read her blog just for the photos (and all the tropical fruit, of course).

Citrus Canker declares Victory in Florida?

Well, it looks like we've officially lost the battle against Citrus Canker here in Florida. It's been pretty much inevitable for a long while, but a combination of ignorance, indifference, and selfishness has made it happen that much sooner. And now it's pretty much an inevitability that it'll hit everywhere else capable of producing citrus in the U.S. If we can't keep it from coming over national borders, where we actually have Customs inspectors, there's no way it's going to stop at state borders or "quarantine zones".

The struggle is an old one. The pathogen, Xanthomonas axonopodis pv. citri, was first found in the U.S. after being discovered on imported Japanese seedlings (it's an Asian disease). It quickly spread throughout the southeast, but aggressive eradication procedures led to a declaration in 1933 that Florida was canker free. That stuck until 1986, when it was found again, south of Tampa. A zillion destroyed trees later, it was declared eradicated in 1994, only to resurface in 1995, in a residencial area near the Miami airport. A recurrence in the area near Tampa popped up in 1997, and both areas are now in an ever expanding state of quarantine. (Read more on Citrus Canker here, on APSNet).

The quarantine involves a severe regimen of destroying all citrus within a certain distance of the infected tree, and the latest outbreaks have resulted in the loss of 1.5 million commercial trees and 600,000 home trees. It is this last group that is the likely weak link. Commercial growers know the stakes, and while the loss of a million trees hurts, citrus canker as an endemic pathogen would hurt even more, both in terms of loss of saleable product, and the loss of markets that would follow. Many homeowners, however, fail to appreciate the implications of the outbreak, and there was often resistance to reporting cases and complying with the quarantine. The Miami outbreak, at least, was probably caused by the introduction of infected ornamental citrus in 1992 or 1993.

Now, after years of continually growing quarantine zones, it looks like we might be on the verge of giving up. The USDA is considering hitting the entire state with a canker quarantine, which would be a severe blow to an already struggling citrus industry, preventing them from shipping to a number of states and countries. The alternative is an expanded quarantine zone around infected trees. Realistically, though, this battle is probably over. Although juice citrus, the mainstay of the Florida industry, will be minimally impacted, this will severely damage the fresh fruit industry.

And, sadly, the next big disease fight for the citrus industry is already looming. Citrus Greening (I like the Chinese name, Huanglongbing), a potentially more serious bacterial malady, was recently found in Florida, and has already spread to more than a dozen counties. This one at least requires an exotic insect vector (introduced to Florida already, sadly), so that at least gives us another link to attack. We'll see how this one plays out. I'm not terribly hopeful.

Grove of American Chestnuts Found!

Looks like a whole grove of American Chestnut trees have been found! These are notable not only because there's a number of them and they appear to have escaped the blight, but also because they are at the extreme southern limit of the species and near FDR's "Little White House" in Warm Springs, Georgia.

Rare American Chestnut Trees Discovered (ABC News)

(For those who don't know and want more info on why this is signficant, try here).

Update: The original article states that there are six trees in the stand, but today on NPR the discoverer mentioned that a cursory walk around the area turned up another one nearby, so it's possible that there may be a considerable pocket of them. He hypothesized that the dry microclimate in the area may make it difficult for the blight pathogen to survive.

Native Fruits from Oikos

Came across this place a while ago...I can't remember if I posted it, but it won't kill you to see it twice if I did. Oikos Tree Crops, located in Michigan, is an unusual take on the standard fruit nursery. Rather than the usual set of cultivars of the usual set of crops, Oikos features native and wild species. And, importantly, they deal primarily in seed propagated plants, meaning each individual is genetically unique. While not a good tactic for guaranteeing the very highest quality, it's still a good long-term strategy, maintaining genetic diversity and the tantalizing (albeit tiny) possibility of each seedling being the next great cultivar.

Anyway, I don't know much about this place beyond its catalog (though a friend of a friend recommends their 'Regent' saskatoon), but it's a fascinating concept. A few of these species I've never seen offered by a nursery, like the wild blueberry Vaccinium pensylvanicum, and the Dunbar's Plum (Prunus xdunbari...a hybrid of the beach plum (Prunus maritima) and the American Plum (Prunus americana)).

I'm going to try to get another Fruit Genetics Friday episode up later tonight, but I make no promises. I've got a meeting tomorrow in Jacksonville that I'm presenting at, and I need to be up early, and I'll be gone all day, so no sneaking in a post at work. Plus I've got to look respectable, which is always a bit of a stretch. So anyway, if not tonight, then maybe Saturday. I'm pretty flexible on the whole "friday" thing.

Hormel Apples?

Hormel (yes, the SPAM folks) of all people actually have a remarkably extensive site on apple cultivars as well as information on how to cook them. They have other fruit pages as well, though they hardly compare to the apple one.

Makes me really want to bake an apple pie. Really. Like I nearly packed up the infant, drove the van across town to the grocery store, bought the necessary ingredients (including apples...I think we have one elderly 'Gala' in the fridge at the moment), came back, and started cooking, at 2:30 in the morning. Nearly. Perhaps tomorrow night.

John Schmid: Thoughts on apple cultivars

John Schmid sent the following to me a long while ago, before some long-forgotten crisis intervened and I forgot about the blog for an age or two. John has a long career in fruit, having worked for Dave Ferree at Ohio State for nearly three decades, and I'm pleased to have him as both a reader and now contributor. He brings up some good points, to which I have no easy answer:

I was fairly new as a horticulture technician in the late 70's when I had my first encounter with a new apple cultivar called Gala. Up to that time, my favorite apples tended to be 'McIntosh' types. In fact, some of my colleagues thought that the stork had been blown off course; I should have been born in New England.

I was impressed with 'Gala'. Here was an apple that was sweet, but had real flavor. Others in both the research and grower communities were also impressed. The only thing not in favor of the cultivar was its color.

Well-positioned fruit of the original 'Gala' would have a red blush on the exposed side, but vast majority of the fruit on a tree were basically yellow with an orange stripe. So, in those early years the hunt was on for a sport that would produce a better-colored 'Gala'.

As this process was going on, I reflected on the situation. Here we have a superior apple and it has a very unique appearance -- what else could we ask for?

Businesses that manufacture goods go to great lengths to differentiate their products. Remember tail fins on cars? Or hood ornaments? Or logos on pockets? The point is not to make the product better, but to identify one's product in the mind of the customer.

We have that difference built in -- and we want to get a red sport of 'Gala' so it can look like every other apple? It just didn't make sense to me.

In later years, I came to realize that people buying fruit in the supermarket will buy apples based on their appearance, Only a small percentage of shoppers really know one cultivar from another. Thus it is necessary to have a uniformly colored fruit, or it will rot on the shelves.

This fact has also been a problem for 'Melrose', the state apple of Ohio. 'Melrose' is a large blocky apple that has a muddy dark red color over 50-70% of its surface. It is a wonderful multipurpose apple. It has a bright tangy taste, cooks well, and is a good addition to cider. Many people feel that it is the best cultivar for making applesauce.

I have often given people a 'Melrose' to taste. The first response is always, without an exception: "Where can I buy them?" In the supermarket, they don't sell because of their appearance.

What can be done?

The problem really boils down to education. If shoppers could be educated about a cultivar, such as Gala or Melrose; they would want to buy it no matter what it looked like. In fact, a unique appearance would be the advantage I presumed it to be way back in the 70's.

Growers can and do educate their customers at their roadside markets, but that is a very small segment of the market. The effort has to be mass-market advertising to make much of a difference.

I even mentally designed an add campaign for 'Melrose' along the line of: "Yes it's ugly, but boy it tastes good." My inspiration was the old Volkswagen ads for the Beetle that tapped into the love of the underdog in the American people.

Yes, advertising campaigns can be created, but the overriding problem is that there is no money for such an ad campaign. The growers are barely surviving now with international competition. Supermarkets will sell what the customer buys and the customers will buy what the supermarkets have to sell. There seems to be no incentive for anyone who could afford to advertise, to invest the kind of money necessary to promote superior apples. So, many good cultivars come and go without a chance to reach the buying public.

Does anyone have a solution? Comments?

I know I've harped on this before, but why, with all the zillions of cultivars out there (a 1905 publication reported 17,000 apple cultivars) did we wind up with the same 4-7 in every store in every state? And while some are pretty decent (a truly ripe 'Fuji' is a wonderful experience), in general they hardly represent the very best there is out there. With some fruit, there's a barrier in the sense that no one is paying attention to the cultivar name (which is virtually never even available). People go to the store to buy, for example, a peach, not, say, a 'White River' peach. No one wants to be surprised, so there's a certain homogenization that's only natural. But if there was one fruit that could overcome that hurdle, it's apples. People know apple cultivars. Granted, just a handful, but people are aware of the fact there are differences in apple varieties, and they're aware that there are particular ones they like. That's an opportunity to build a market that's not being taken advantage of, or at least not very often. Certainly there have been additions to the elite club that is supermarket apples over the past decade ('Pink Lady', for example) but they are few and far between. As John mentions, American apple growers are taking a beating from international competition. Why not take advantage of the fact that America is home to more apple cultivars than any place on earth, all developed and adapted for conditions here, and build markets for some of the other often forgotten apples. There's been such an effort, on a rather localized basis, with the 'Gravenstein' apple in the Sebestapol area in California. There are literally hundreds of apples worthy of similar campaigns.

I could ramble like this for another page or two, but like I said, I don't know what the solution is either. But the opportunity is there if some one does.

Haskap, aka blue honeysuckle

I've been thinking of writing something up about Lonicera caerulea, or blue honeysuckle, for some time now, but having run across this article by Maxine Thompson over at the Home Orchard Society website, it seems a lot easier to just link to it.

"Haskap", apparently is the name used for L. caerulea by the Ainu of Hokkaido, in northern Japan. Apparently some one's decided to stick with this name to differentiate it from the Russian types which are already being marketed as "honeyberries". It's all just blue honeysuckle to me.

I've heard varying reports on the quality of this stuff, ranging from "wonderful!" to "not worth growing". I've seen the plants a few times (blue honeysuckle, not Haskap per se), but never with ripe fruit, so I can't vouch for it myself. Dr. Thompson and collaborators have begun an actual breeding program, which is exciting...I'm always pleased to see a new fruit breeding program spring into existence, particularly in this country.

Fruit Genetics Friday #1b: Polyploidy(And yeah, I know it's Saturday...)

Well, here I am at 1:34am in the lab, waiting an hour so I can dump a little media onto a couple of plates and go home, so I thought maybe to pass the time I'd give you folks a real post for a change.

This is Fruit Genetics Friday #1b, because there's another #1 that covers the real basic stuff that isn't finished, and might never be. Frankly, basic genetics, while certainly cool, gets a little old to write a ton about, and I'm guessing my average reader remembers the really basic stuff. If you don't, feel free to ask questions. I won't think any less of you for it.

So on to the fruit genetics and one of my favorite topics, polyploidy:

One of the first major wrinkles one runs into when trying to understand the genetics of many fruit crops is polyploidy. Remember how people (and most animals and many plants) have two of each gene, one copy from each parent? That makes them diploid. That's sort of the basic model, and in the animal world it's the most common one. But in plants (and a few insects, reptiles, and amphibians), it's not uncommon to have more than the basic two sets of chromosomes, a condition called polyploidy ("di" meaning two, vs. "poly" meaning many, see?). Estimates are all over the place, but somewhere in the vicinity of 70% of plant species (angiosperms, anyway) are or have been polyploid at some point in their evolutionary past. An awful lot of crop species are polyploid, partly because one of the traits of polyploids is that they tend to be bigger than the their diploid counterparts, and in general bigger has been considered better when it comes to crop development.

For example, I started my career working with a diploid species, grapes, did my M.S. working with tetraploid blackberries (four sets of chromosomes), and now work with strawberries, which are octoploid (eight sets of chromosomes.) The cultivated strawberry is among the crops with the highest ploidy level, although there are blackberry species with as high as twelve sets of chromosomes (dodecaploid maybe? I get mixed up past ten. By the way, standard shorthand for these things is to use "x" to represent the basic chromosome set for a species, so a diploid is denoted as 2x, and tetraploid, 4x, etc.)

Just like diploids, when polyploids reproduce, they form eggs and pollen cells containing half the normal complement of chromosomes. This generally works pretty well if you've got an even number of sets of chromosomes, but it becomes a problem in odd-ploid plants. If you've got three copies of a particular chromosome, and the cells splits to form two pollen grain, what happens to the extra? The answer varies...sometimes one cell gets it and the other doesn't, sometimes it's just lost. The result, anyway, is reproductive cells that are complete mess a lot of the time. This results in sterile plants. A good example of this is the cultivated banana, which is triploid. Wild, diploid bananas are full of seeds, but because cultivated types can't produce viable sex cells, no fertilization takes place, and we get our nice soft, seedless bananas (although some one once told me that about one in every five or ten thousand bananas will contain a viable seed, the result of the off chance that a particular combination of chromosomes works out).

There are two types of polyploids, which are formed in two different ways. The simplest kind of polyploid is called an autoploid. In an autoploid, all the chromosome sets come from the same species. This can come from a spontaneous doubling in a vegetatively propagated plant (this happens when a cell basically makes a mistake mid-division and fails to divide after duplicating it's chromosomes). This has, for example, resulted in a handful of grape cultivars, such as 'Pierce', which was identified as a large-fruited shoot on an 'Isabella' vine. The other possible cause is the tendency of plants to occasionally produce sex cells with double the normal genetic complement, which are called "unreduced gametes". These unreduced gametes can also join to produce autoploids.

The other kind is called an alloploid. Alloploids have two or more different types of chromosomes, generally from ancestors of two or more different species. In octoploid strawberry we use the notation AAA'A'BBB'B' to indicate that the eight sets of chromosomes come in four different types, from four different ancestral species. Most crosses between species fail, resulting in sterile progeny (because unlike sets of chromosomes will not pair, it is next to impossible to form viable gametes, just like in an odd-ploid plant). However, if at some point the resulting plant doubles its genetic contents, the problem is solved. A new hybrid with genomes AB can't reproduce, because A chromosomes won't pair with B chromosomes. However, if AB becomes AABB, then the A chromosomes will pair with the other A chromosomes, and the B with the B, and fertility is restored, though frequently at less than perfect levels.

These potential problems with fertility are part of why artificial polyploids have been successful in only a relatively few cases. Even if a plant has big fruit, if it has sterility problems and has trouble actually producing that fruit, it's not going to be a hit. There are other problems, too, though they vary somewhat from species to species. In addition to fertility issues, polyploids tend to be less tolerant of cold, have less rugged shoots, and sometimes have disease issues as well.

Well, my labwork is calling. Next installment I'll look at inheritance in polyploids, and why it's so darn kooky. (I'm hoping to post a list of polyploid fruits here for you, but it's 2:30am, I've got lab work to do and a baby squawking, and I can't get the table HTML right, so it's got to wait.) I realize this may be a tad technical for some folks...like I said, let me know if there's something you're curious about and I didn't do a good job explaining it.

Anyway, good night, folks.

Update: Here's the little table I promised you folks. I really need to get me some fancy program to do my HTML...it's too tiring to do a big table, so this is hardly an exhaustive list, just some examples

Update 2: The table is screwing things up, and my imperfect knowledge of HTML leaves me helpless when it comes to fixing it. So no more table. Sorry. I'd try to sort it out, but I'm way, way, too tired. So anyway, polyploids include blackberries, strawberries, sour cherries, European plums, bananas, blueberries, persimmons, some apples and mandarins, etc.