Well, there’s not that much to say about when Glo and Star Ripen, but I’m sorry to make a mess of your room.
My Artic Glos are still hard as rocks even though they’ve looked dead ripe for at least 2 weeks. At least there are no cracks.
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Alan,
It is not “my room” at all. We are here to exchange info, learn and chit chat
(sometimes). As you know, the name of a thread is what draws people to check the thread.
We all go off topics at times. The off topic discussions usually contain helpful info, too. I just don’t want others to miss out on such discussions if they are hidden inside an unrelated thread.
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Sorry, I was just kidding a bit, but also apologizing for contributing to some piracy here, but your good natured and quite reasonable reply is appreciated.
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OK, first tree ripe Arctic Glo sampled. It didn’t knock my socks off, but then the brix was a surprisingly low 13%. This is a tough year so far for getting up sugar in fruit here- even though precip has been less lately the soil is still pretty wet when usually it is fairly dry by now. Silver Gem and Jade did get higher sugar, though, and the Jade is right next. Glo is small like Silver Gem but it doesn’t have all the beautiful red in the flesh.
Just one piece of fruit from a small tree with only a few more on it. If subsequent ones are markedly different I’ll post it.
It still has more flavor than any peaches I’ve picked yet this year.
I notice in Adam’s chart Jade is supposed to ripen before SG, but the opposite occured here.
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Picked Arctic Glo today. I think they were a bit past due. Some have skin that started to shrivelled a bit. Not good looking fruit under my management :)
slight_smile:
It was sweet with some acid in it. Even picky eater daughter said she likes it. Brix was 18-20.
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My Arctic Jay was much better. Soon will have homemade raspberry jam for picky daughter! Love you Nisa!
You mean Actic Jay nects are better than Arctic Glo?
Yep, to me it was. I had both, and ultimalely lost them to borers early on before I had a solid spray sched.
Someone here said Arctic Jay was not that good. Glad you like it. I grafted it this year.
Glad you did! Hope it took! It is a beautiful white nect.
The graft took 
)
I have to wonder how you are getting 18-20 brix in this weather. Are you sure your refractometer is gauged correctly? I haven’t measured my Artic Stars but they taste about like 13. The highest I got was 17.5 from an early nect when we’d had a month of dry weather preceding harvesting it. And that was a particularly good one. My Artic Stars are by far the smallest nects I’ve grown.
We re-calibrated our refractometer last month for this season’s measurement. In fact, the 3rd Arctic Glo we ate had lower brix at 15.
The brix reading and our taste buds have been similar. Sometimes we eat pieces of fruit before we measure the brix. We can mostly tell if the brix will be high or low base on how sweet our taste buds feel. Sometimes we even play a guessing the brix game. We usually make good guesses.
Not everything tasted sweet in this rainy weather. One Nadia that dropped yesterday was bland @11 brix. Beauty plum was bland. Shiro was bland. We had one Artic Star, not quite ripe at 15 brix.
15 is high enough to be real good- to me about 17 is perfect and more sugar doesn’t make a better nect. Lucky my standards don’t require a higher number to be blissed.
What surprised me was that with high sugar, these Arctic Glo also had a noticeable level of acid. It was a nice combination.
Yeah, mine taste good this year also- maybe better than the similar Silver Gem, which ripens earlier, and this year in the middle of a lot of rain. I’m beginning to believe that in the humid region, the quality of peaches and nectarines is affected a lot by the week or 2 of weather preceding picking. Not just about rain, but having enough strong sun between rain- the soil has stayed saturated here this year. This year Jade was probably my best white nectarine. It has some acid and good sugar and actually produced large fruit for such an early nect. In the past it was a cracker, but somehow it didn’t crack too much this year. It ripens exactly with Silver Gem, which didn’t and doesn’t seem to crack much based on 3 seasons.
That said, for some reason, a dry 2nd half of summer didn’t improve brix of later fruit that much last year after a way too wet and cloudy first half (worse than this year). This stuff is very complicated- the more you learn the less you know.
By the way, I ate a perfect Necterfest the other day. Didn’t measure but it must have been about 17 brix. Others have been almost as good but not quite there. A nice thing about it is that it doesn’t color up much like Eastern Glo, which turns bright red which attracts birds. It is a better tasting nect as well and gets higher sugar based on one season of a smallish crop (hardly worth anything, as evaluations go). Also, the Eastern Glo is too crowded by nursery trees big enough to move this fall and shade the tree early and late.
For some reason, my experience is the opposite of Scott’s- often the first couple of crops are the sweetest- then the root system gets established and trees pull in too much water and become too vigorous. Not just at my site either.
That is why I like them. Jay is very good too, but to me Glo is the true winner. Glo ripens about the 10th of August, but this year they are 2-3 weeks behind. I’m looking at Sept They are still the size of golf balls. About 10 have been removed by animals and I found out why. Even though they are not ripe they are extremely sweet this year. All the fallen fruit was sweet as can be. Never had fruit half ripe taste this sweet. Usually completely inedible, and lemon peel bitter. It looks like my Indian Free will not ripen on time this year. Everything is weeks behind.
Drew,
I don’t know how you do it. Your nects ( from last year’s pics) looked so perfect!!! Any secret?
@alan, I only had those four in the pic left. This afternoon, we ate two more. One had brix at 18 and the other at 20. I know the reading was consistent because I measured my Shiro and the farmstand-bought peach. They tasted equally bland. Both had brix at 10. The reading matched how they tasted.
It’s the area and lack of pests. Nothing much I’m doing, just your normal sprays.
I just wish I knew your secret. I’d like to see some pictures of your trees to see if there are any clues there as to why your brix get so high in this monsoon we are having. I just measured an artic star with 10- horrible, although it’s a very young tree without structure to have fruit out in the exposed parts of the tree. My Summer Beauts would be a commercial growers dream, but they are coming in at about 12 and will only be appreciated by the uninitiated.
This is shaping up to be another bland year on the east coast for me, although certain varieties may not suffer as much as others- such as Nectafest.
I have big vigorous trees- like the ones Olpea shows in his photos. They have full root access to unlimited water on a year like this. I have to keep summer pruning to keep fruit exposed to sun, but there are plenty of leaves for each fruit.
I have noticed in the orchards I manage that it is often the locations that produce runts that have the best quality fruit. Trees bare a fraction of the fruit mine do, but the quality is there.
The positive thing is I sell trees and not fruit- rapid growth is making me money.