Subject: [nafex] Book: The perfect fruit: good breeding, bad seeds, and the hunt for the elusive pluot
Date: Fri, 07 Jun 2013 03:32:29 -0400
By Chip Brantley; Bloomsbury USA, 2009.
Brantley discusses the California stone fruit industry (especially
Japanese plums), the careers
and contributions of Luther Burbank and Floyd Zaiger and others, and
recent developments in Japanese plum hybrids.
He emphasizes the quest for quality as a route to competitive
advantage.
A few things that stand out are the move to controlled cultivars, not
only as a means to limit production and boost prices, but also for
quality control (and control of prices). The importance of brands means
large scale organization. Since cooperation is not a route being taken
this means large corporations in growing and marketing.
It seems that new hybrid plum cultivars from Israel and elsewhere have
Brix ratings up to 29. I guess it will take a while before these filter
down to the home grower.
However, tasting what I'm able to buy from the local carriage-trade
supermarket, I still haven't encountered anything matching the
California grown Queen Anns I was able to buy when I lived in Ottawa in
the 1970s from a certain produce store in the Byward Market which I
suspect catered to the embassy trade - or the Burbanks which I ate off
trees in the hot Niagara summer of 1988. If you really like good fruit,
there is still good reason to grow your own, and I suspect there always
will be.
Doug Woodard
St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada
[nafex] Book: The perfect fruit: good breeding, bad seeds, and the hunt for the elusive pluot,
dwoodard, 06/07/2013