North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

[Melissa Kacalanos <mijwiz@yahoo.com>]

There are also some interesting plum articles,
including lengthy descriptions of varieties, in the
Spring '96 issue of the New York Fruit Quarterly:
http://www.nyshs.org/fq/06spring/06NYFQSpring.pdf
Since they're not selling the plums, they are free to
use phrases like "Quality is mediocre."

There are so many tasty-sounding varieties, though,
I'll have a hard time planting only a reasonable
number of trees. In addition to these varieties, I'm
also interested in the Asian-American hybrids like
Toka, which I hear are better adapted to cold
climates.

Someone mentioned Toka plum a while ago, and said it
was hard to market because it's smaller than the
supermarket plums the average consumer is familiar
with. I see that some are marketing it as "Bubblegum
Plum" in the hopes of appealing to today's consumer,
who apparently doesn't recognize natural flavors
anymore, but only can recognize artificial flavors.
Kind of like saying, "Look, this isn't a weird scary
thing that grew on a tree, it's a real food, just like
the stuff inside the candy wrappers."

Melissa
I picked half a strawberry yesterday from my
two-month-old garden. I will not be asking for storage
recipes anytime soon.