North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

["Lon J. Rombough" <lonrom@hevanet.com>]

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From: ARS News Service <NewsService@ars.usda.gov>
Reply-To: ARS News Service <NewsService@ars.usda.gov>
Date: Mon, 05 Apr 2004 09:34:37 -0400
To: ARS News subscriber <lonrom@hevanet.com>
Subject: New Peach Looks Funny, Tastes Great

STORY LEAD:
New Peach Looks Funny, Tastes Great

___________________________________________

ARS News Service
Agricultural Research Service, USDA
Marcia Wood, (301) 504-1662, MarciaWood@ars.usda.gov
April 5, 2004
___________________________________________

A fun-to-eat peach called "Galaxy" has a great taste and an amusing,
flat shape. It looks something like a bagel, and tastes sweet and juicy.


Offered to nurseries and researchers for the first time last year by
Agricultural Research Service tree fruit breeders in California, Galaxy
is what fruit fanciers will recognize as a "peento" peach, short for the
original Chinese "Pan Tao."  
 
Galaxy has a delightful, delicate aroma; light-cream skin accented with
an attractive red blush; and pleasantly firm-textured white flesh. It
ripens at the same time of year--the third to fourth week of June--as a
popular peento peach called Saturn. But Galaxy is bigger.  

Geneticist David W. Ramming and colleagues at the ARS Postharvest
Quality and Genetics Research Unit in Parlier developed Galaxy in 10
years of fruit breeding and testing. The new peach's lineage includes a
nectarine developed by U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) researchers
and a peento peach from Rutgers University.

In 1994, Ramming hybridized, or crossed, the parent peaches that would
yield Galaxy. The following year, he singled out Galaxy for further
study in his research orchards at the ARS San Joaquin Valley
Agricultural Sciences Center in Parlier and those of the neighboring
Kearney Agricultural Center.
 
So far, Ramming's team has provided more than 33,000 buds for staffers
at tree fruit nurseries to graft to familiar rootstocks. Galaxy peaches
may begin showing up in supermarkets in 2006.
 
Like most peaches, Galaxy is self-pollinating, so it doesn't require
proximity to other peach trees--a boon for backyard gardeners who don't
have room for more than one peach tree. And, although not yet tested
outside of California, Galaxy might do well in southern peach-growing
states such as Georgia and South Carolina

Read more about the research in the April 2004 issue of Agricultural
Research magazine, available online at:
http://www.ars.usda.gov/is/AR/archive/apr04/fruit0404.htm

ARS is the U.S. Department of Agriculture's chief scientific research
agency. 
___________________________________________

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