North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

[mIEKAL aND <qazingulaza@gmail.com>]

Most of the growers were recommending picking at 18 brix because they
are concerned about the berries going into a brown state where it
loses some of the anthocyanins.

Lon, I'm curious if you think long term planting of a limited genetic
variability would be an issue with aronia?

~mIEKAL

On Mon, Aug 31, 2009 at 9:19 AM, Lon J. Rombough<lonrom@hevanet.com> wrote:
> Most of the Aronia improvement seems to have been done in eastern Europe,
> using a relatively limited range of material collected in America.  The
> local experiment station has a collection of Aronia varieties that I
> evaluated one year.  The only real differences in the cultivars was some
> variation in productivity and about a week's difference in ripening times
> over the whole group of ten or so varieties.  Sugar was 21 to 24 Brix.  The
> two best performing  cultivars were Nero and Viking.  This was several years
> ago when the plants were just getting into production.  Now the row looks
> like a hedge and the differences between varieties are even less obvious.  I
> grew a row of seedlings of Viking that had so little variation you could
> almost plant a field from seed and still get useable production.
> -Lon Rombough
> NEW grape pruning video: http://www.bunchgrapes.com/dvd.html View a short,
> low resolution clip here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Q58zFY0B1M
> Grapes, writing, consulting, my book, The Grape Grower, at
> http://www.bunchgrapes.com  Winner of the Garden Writers Association "Best
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> A video about The Grape Grower :
> http://cookingupastory.com/index.php/2008/04/18/the-grape-grower/
> On Aug 31, 2009, at 5:27 AM, mIEKAL aND wrote:
>
> The range of diversity seems extremely narrow & I imagine the
> initiative would benefit from more selections & cross breeding with
> local genetics.  It was mentioned that aronia is native to Wisconsin
> tho I've never seen it myself.