Starks sent out email with the new varieties shown below. I’m not interested in adding more peaches but they did discuss having new peach rootstocks. I receive their wholesaler emails.
Scarlet Crush™
Tops in taste tests! Our new Honeycrisp/Pink Lady® cross is sweet with citrusy notes, plus all that famous Honeycrisp snap and juiciness. 3" pink/rosy-red fruit is uniform, conical and attractive. A fine cooking and fresh-eating apple. Keeps up to 6 months. Ripens as early as late September. USPPAF. Zones 5-7.
Ruby Darling™
The best of both Honeycrisp and Gala! Large 3-4" cherry-red apples sport a pretty shape and extra-large cells that deliver a distinctive crisp-cruch and refreshingly sweet juice. Keeps 4-5 months in cold storage. This tree has an open, spreading growth habit and is a heavy bearer. Ripens starting in early October. USPPAF. Zones 5-7.
This got me to thinking a bit today as I get the same emails. What goes into patenting a plant? Does your patent say a cross between Honey Crisp and Pink Lady or does it contain the DNA blueprint? Because if I simply pollinate a Honey Crisp tree with a Pink Lady pollen am I infringing on their patent? I know there may be much more to their description than that such as back crosses and so forth, but what if it really is as simple as that HC x PL cross.
A cross between Honeycrisp and Pink Lady sounds like a real winner in my book. If it has the explosive juiciness and texture of Honeycrisp with the complexity of flavor is PL it will be a winner. And sounds like it has better keeping qualities as well. Curious how disease resistant it will be.
Dang, Clark! There’s already more varieties out there than you can shake a piece of hedge at! How in the heck is a body supposed to ever work their way through them?
Seriously, what I mean to say is that I don’t think that having more options is our best option; having more understanding of existing options is more useful. In short, things are confusing enough as is.
@TurkeyCreekTrees, I’m not aware of DNA being required. They generally describe the cross and detail characteristics of the tree and fruit. You aren’t infringing by crossing, although HC and PL are both off patent now anyway. Here is the patent for Goldrush if you’re interested in what is included in a patent…
So hypothetically I could cross HC and PL ( which actually doesnt exist as a variety, just the selling name for Cripps Pink) end up with the same variety as “Scarlet Crush” and as long as I sell it under the name of “Honey Lady” I am ok?
Scarlet Crush actually sounds tempting taste wise though I imagine it will have CAR and Scab susceptibility.
For example: the Golden Delicious apple has been crossed with the Cox Orange Pippin apple. That cross has produced a number of unique and valuable offspring.
The Rubinette apple is a Cox/GD child. Freyburg is another Cox/GD child.
Good for Stark Bros. Kudos to them for releasing apples in the HC family without making them club apples.
I also saw Gurney’s/Scarlet Tanager has something they are calling an early Goldrush apple. It must be a seedling rather than a sport. It is called Crunch-a-Bunch.
Yes I understand that each apple seed is a genetic individual. Sorry what I am asking is apparently not coming through. I dont want to derail Clarks topic so I will just let it be. When I think of a new way to ask what is rolling around in my mind I will start a new topic.
you have to be interested in a Honeycrisp-Pink Lady cross. I am not that interested in HC, but I am a bit too far north to grow PL. If this thing has inherited the cold hardiness and October ripening of HC, well, I happen to have a Spygold tree that croaked this year and needs replacing.
Glad to see this also. I just ordered 225 trees each of Scarlet Crush and Ruby Darling on Geneva Rootstock for 2019. I hope they do well. I am especially interested in the Scarlet Crush. I was actually wondering what such a cross would be like. I am pleasantly surprised at the mid season ripening time.
Professional breeders are saying that seeds of Honeycrisp or Fuji are producing a very high percentage of superb seedlings with quite a few equal to or better than the parent. If you’re an amateur apple breeder this might be a productive path to follow.
I stumbled upon these varieties at Stark’s web site today. I could be reading too much into this, but only the Ruby Darling says anything about large cells. That’s what makes Honeycrisp special to most of its fans, if Scarlet Crush had the large cells I’d expect Stark Bros to mention it in the description.
I have been wondering how come there haven’t been more crosses with more “exceptional” varieties? Honeycrisp x (cox, spitz, ashmaed’s, etc)?
There are several varieties with Cox as a parent: Holstein, Karmijn de Sonnaville, Alkmene, Cherry Cox, Queen Cox, and Winston come to mind. There are others directly related to Ribston Pippin such as Margil. Spitz is a disease magnet so I would guess that might disqualify it for breeding. Ashmeads is a triploid but could accept pollen only. Ashmeads is a connoisseur’s apple. Most in the US still want a shiny, juicy and crunchy apple.
What I mean is crossing honeycrisp with these apples so that they can get the large cells of the honeycrisp with all the flavor and aroma of some of these others. Instead of crossing with Cox we get Honeycrisp crossed with a Cox descendant that shares parentage with Red Delicious.
Sexual propagation of patented plants are allowed. So you can hybridize patented plants. Even if you use the same patented parents, the chances of producing identical zygotic plants with the same DNA is close enough to zero. It is different when genes are patented, you cannot use the genes be it plants or microbes or humans without permission or royalty payments with the patent assignees.
It is illegal to propagate patented plants asexually and I haven’t checked about nucellar true to type seedlings if they’re being considered illegal propagation. You know the patent laws were written long before true to type seedlings were validated. There could be amendments to the old rules.
Interesting. http://calag.ucanr.edu/archive/?type=pdf&article=ca.v003n01p9
Seedlings that originate from the nucellus,
without sexual reproduction, exhibit
a remarkable increase in vigor. The cause
of this invigoration is not known but it
is a well established fact that certain virus
diseases are eliminated and that this accounts
for some of the favorable effects.