North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

[Sarah Kehler Ewing <skkewing@yahoo.com>]

Hi Melissa,

I used to have Kiwis: I had Arguta and Issai for a year and a half. They 
survived -45 windy winter with no snow cover or protection of any kind, 
blossomed and had fruit on them, but they couldn't survive my lovely heritage 
Silver Appleyard Ducks.  Those quackers just wouldn't stay out of my kiwi row 
and tromped them to death with their big stinkin' feet!  Once we are finished 
building our house and have landscaping done I'm definitely putting in more.  
I don't seem to be successful at growing the Arctic Kiwi (the tricoloured 
kiwis) from seed this year!

I'm growing quince by seed just for fun.  One of these years I'll grow enough 
pear rootstock and graft some hardier varieties to see how they do here. 
Flowering Quince sounds nice.

The PhD thing: I chose medical inorganic biochemistry over biology 
biochemistry or a straight MD (what was I thinking?) partly because of what 
you said: I didn't want to create GMO golf ball tomatoes or Round-up ready 
anything.  I didn't finish my PhD for an entirely different reason though.  I 
went to the U of Alabama Tuscaloosa to take over this fabulous research 
progect involving Diabetes from my professor's star pupil.  She got her PhD 
in 4 years flat and won every research/dissertation award the university had 
while doing it.  No one could figure out why such a star researcher wanted to 
just teach and wasn't going to do a post doc and look for a research 
professorship.  Then I got there and felt like an idiot for two years because 
I couldn't reproduce her results, never mind generate any of my own.  Turns 
out (yes, I made my boss say this to me verbatim before I left) she faked 
$500,000.00 worth of research!  Her entire PhD was fabricated which is
 why I and no one else got the same results and why she wasn't going anywhere 
near more research!  My boss made several mistakes including showing her what 
kind of results he hoped to get, not supervising her, and letting her take 
raw data home and come back with nice graphs to put in her research books.  
So I got to decide if I was going to start over at square one after 2 years 
when I was 8 months pregnant and had no medical insurance because my husband 
was getting out of the Army and heading back to Canada to work on his career. 
 Not much of a choice!  Under "normal" circumstances I would have gotten a 
gimme MSc but if my research went public it would have jeopardized my boss's 
career and likely the entire Chemistry Dept. 

Such is life!  Makes you wonder how much stock you should put into what 
"scientists" say, doesn't it?

Sarah 
zone 3
Edmonton, AB

> No kiwis? I just ordered some that the catalog claims are
> hardy to zone 3, Michigan State and Andrey. 
> 
> About qinces: have you tried flowering quince, the scrappy
> little shrub? 
> 
> It looks like we're in the same boat, or tree, or
> metaphor of your choice. When I realized I could either
> finish my Ph.D in genetics or get a life, I got a life.
> Also, all the plant breeding research I saw ahead of me looked very
> dreary: either genetically modifying corn to improve
> Monsanto's profit margin, or breeding fruit and
> vegetables to be more durable, storeable, and shippable, and
> carefully rogueing out anything of a weird color or shape
> that surveys said consumers wouldn't recognize as
> looking like a proper ordinary fruit or vegetable.