To: "North American Fruit Explorers" <nafex@lists.ibiblio.org>
Subject: Re: [NAFEX] Do I have a white flesh peach?
Date: Wed, 3 Sep 2008 22:50:49 -0500
Mark wrote, "The wholesale nurseries just want to get rid of trees....So
when Wal-Mart(plug in your favorite box store)orders 5000 Georgia Belles for
their Midwest stores, my theory is the
nursery may only have 2000 Georgia Belles, but fills the rest of the order
with whatever they have."
Sorry Mark, but your theory is backwards to the real situation, as explained
to me by UT's horticulture expert, David Lockwood. He says that when the
nurserys package up their remaining trees and sell them in bulk to the
package stores, the stores say, "Don't put labels on them, we'll put our own
labels on them." Of course, since it's difficult or more like impossible to
tell one variety from another, they just stick on thousands of labels that
say "Bartlett pear" or "Granny Smith apple" and years later all the pears
are Kieffer and all the apples are RD.
The funniest one I have personally experienced was a package orchard
that had been planted by friends of friends, and the friend took me out
there to pick grapes after the fof had put the place up for sale and moved
away. I was noticing how many of the little pear trees had fireblight, and
noticed one tree that looked sort of like a pear, certainly not like any
other fruit tree, and I wondered aloud what it was. My friend said it was a
Bartlett pear. I said no it wasn't. She said it was, I said it wasn't, and
finally she got mad and said, "I know it's a Bartlett because it's got a
label on it that says so!" And sure enough there was such a label. So I
looked at it and at all the others and said, "Whatever it is, it's not a
Bartlett." It was the only one there with no blight at all. I wonder about
that scene now and then, if it was the first Bradford pear I ever saw, or if
it was just a poplar. I wasn't all that familiar with pears at the time,
but David Lockwood had told me that he'd never seen a living Bartlett tree
over 4 years old in Tennessee. I meet people all the time who think they
have a Bartlett pear tree.
Other interesting things I have seen were 4 grafted pecans on sale half
price, and I looked carefully to find that all 4 had failed grafts. Someone
else saw a willow tree labeled as a cherry. Donna