Many rare fruits are lost to time. Countless named varities of pears and apples that were once popular lost favor over time. My family once grew a very rare pumpkin that typically produced 3 - 5 large thick walled pumpkins per vine. Not realizing what we had we counted on nature to keep growing that pumpkin in my childhood. Over time we lost that wonderful pumpkin that had grown for years on its own. Many people have had such a prize as the Clarks Crabapple slip through their fingers. People ask why i give it away for free but it was never mine to give away anymore than those pumpkins. Everything in nature belongs to everyone, but very few people realize it. My hands kept that tree alive long enough to pass it on to others. I achieved my purpose this time. I will only make the mistake i did with that pumpkin once. Nature is ever changing , evolving into something else even when people cant see it. The autumn olive , and the callery pear are here to stay. Many fight nature because they dont like its rules. Nature preserves the fittest. There are people who will cut down calleries believing they will erradicate them. It will not happen the callery will outlive them. We can only control a small part of things. Consider buying goats and letting them eat the calleries or grafting them over. To waste energy fighting a strong competitor is naive at best unless you have the strength to win. You cannot control your neighbors or your government who both have calleries that will seed your property again when your sick or old. Consider extint animals
Thylacine - Wikipedia . What happened to the dodo? People meddling were the ends of many animals, plants, and birds The Dodo Bird.
The passenger pigeon must have been delicious
Billions to none... the extinction of the Passenger Pigeon | John James Audubon Center at Mill Grove. Consider people continue to repeat their mistakes like i made with the pumpkin in my childhood. All people have value and not everyone recognizes it. To expand that a little i would say all things have value. The callery pear is already beginning to grow larger fruit. In the next 50 - 1000 years i would expect those fruit to attract deer and cattle and other large creatures to carry their seed intentionally or unintentionally. The more brush people remove the more thorny brush becomes prolific. What are your thoughts on extinction?
I used to be more concerned about it because of the loss of unique genetic material. But in recent years was led to believe that the potential for extreme diversity is never lost. All known genes arose from only a few genes and this can happen again and again. Nothing is really lost in the sense potential for new even more complex and diverse genes is still very possible. Life will adapt to any conditions. Extinction events happen and will continue to happen. The large mammals are going to disappear one way or another. So my concerns are not such a big deal. One day something will replace the mammal. It’s just how things work. One day earth itself will be returned to basic elements to start the cycle again. The nature of the universe cannot be changed.
That is a fascinating theory. Thanks for posting that it gives me a glimmer of hope. I believe in that idea to a degree. I think civilization repeats itself but each time very different from the time before. The reason i’m concerned about things like those pumpkins is our life now is much worse without them. If you have ever lost someone or something dear to you it is easily understood. We took for granted that the pumpkins were wild and would always be there. Many people before us did the same with things like buffalo. Buffalo were favored by nature and yet people interfered with their success.
I do agree with what you’re saying. I value heirlooms. I have the world’s first primocane fruiting purple raspberry that Mother Nature produced in my yard. Two root tips died and the only example is the original plant. The flavor is outstanding. Tastes like sweet boysenberries but is very winter hardy. I’m going to be very upset if I can’t spread this around. It’s very unique. Most purples are ok I’ve been told but not great. This one is one of the best raspberries I ever tasted. Brix is high for our area. Yet it has that boysenberry tart zing! I’ll measure brix this year. It’s ripening now. I agree we should do all we can to keep winning plants around. I do worry about the same thing. In the long run it matters little but it matters a lot to me all the same!
If the pumpkin was so good, why did it go extinct? Because it wasn’t that good or essential. Same with apples and pears. Further those old inferior varieties are being replaced by better varieties. Witness pluots better than plums. Further if you just want heirloom types; plant some pear, apple, or apricot seeds. You’ll have new heirlooms.
Lots of people are saving heirlooms and breeding new fruits. Fruits aren’t going extinct. They’re getting better.
What I’d like right now is not the best heirlooms ever but the best fruits that man will ever create. The latter will win going away.
I agree with that about most things. Consider kamut wheat. It is superior in many ways to modern wheat. It was almost lost to time. That pumpkin grew on its own out in the open fields. We harvested to many likely. The idea that only the best win isn’t always true. All things equal if buffalo and domestic cows are put out on open range the buffalo will do very well.
I do not necessarily agree new fruits do anything better. But what we want the fruits to do changes. We have uniculture to blame. People not baking their own pumpkin pies has left Kentucky Field Pumpkin to dominate the commercial crop. But it’s hardly better tasting. Just easier to process.
you ever get some to share , keep me in mind. i cant grow boysens here so yours gives me a opportunity i wouldn’t have other wise. gladly buy a few from you.
I generally agree. The problem is people. People have bad taste and often don’t work for their best interest.
Lol…Bad taste? Seriously?
Many of the “Better New Fruit” are wonders of cryo-gassing…lol Not what I’s necessarily call “Good Taste”.
A good Hudson Golden Gem is very hard to beat taste wise for example. A Pomme De Fer or Shockley will keep just fine without the need to be cryo-gassed.
Seriously I’d drive across Michigan to pick up if need be! Love to help “spread” the genetics!
hey Drew. maybe you could make some coin propagating / selling these puppies!
I understand what you mean about the best and I agree with you in principal. I am not trying to be a contrarian but here are my thoughts on this. Being “The Best Best” is subjective. How many products claim " New and Improved" or " Better Tasting" but are they really? Probably not.
Using apples for my example- The newer variety of apples seem to try to have two things in common
- being crunchy 2) disease resistant. At least the #1 part. All the never variety apples strive to have that crunch. Yet for the most part they really are not that tasty nor have the the apple flavor, at least to me.
Heirloom apples seemed to all have some sort of purpose. Early apples for making sauce and feeding the family or livestock. Mid and later apples for cooking, apple butter, baking, and storing for the winter to feed the family.
Now it is mainly for just eating, if they are worth that. Most of the apples grown today are for just eating. Mainly 80% of the apples grown today are used for eating and 20% for cooking. About 80 + years or so it was reverse. Most of the apples 80%+ were used for cooking and the rest, 20% , was used for eating.
Does that mean the apples today are " Better" or “The Best” that man has ever created? Times and tastes may change and today’s " WOW" apples will be forgotten and some " New and Improved" versions will be out then.
I prefer eating apples with apple taste and not all crunch and tasteless juice.
Extinct varieties of fruits, animals, insects, and plants happen all the time.
The apples were not that hard crisp texture they are now.
I agree with what Drew said. We can try all we want to make things better but Mother nature just laughs and does what she wants to do sooner or later.
Zaiger’s fruits are the best I’ve eaten. Pluots are clearly better than the Jap plums they came from. Now there are dozens of breeders around the world breeding new fruits. No question in my mind that some of those will be better eating than the old standards.
I don’t cook with fruits. In general, all that does is turn healthy great tasting fruit into unhealthy pastries and pies. I go into the grocery store and it’s full of cookies, pastries, pies, and cakes that are half sugar. You don’t need fruit to make sweet junk food. No thanks.
Sure. But cooking with the right fruit needs no added junk too. Most of the cooking with junk is to spur a profit motive.
My concern is that the so called “improvements” are really skewed towards the growing regions where that particular crop tends to be grown commercially.
For example, based on pure taste pluots are a top tier fruit if you can grow them, but I think they have to narrow of a growing region to be considered an improvement over other plum hybrids. For me I view the hybrid plums that came of out the University of Minnesota as a better improvement than what pluots gave us. So, it all depends on where you’re growing.
I think the loss of fruit varieties affects growers outside of those commercial hotspots more because the varieties being lost, are the ones that would have done better in our locations. But because we no longer have viable markets to grow those fruits they’re just not valued anymore.
But I wonder what happens when those areas that are the prime commercial growing areas for those crops can no longer grow them? Either for economic, environmental, or other land use reasons. My county here in Iowa used to have large apple festivals and acres of orchards in the late 1800’s. But they were pushed out for more profitable crops like corn and soybeans. As the world changes there’s no reason to think Pluots or any other crop will command the land location it’s growing on forever.
If those varieties that grow better in other regions are allowed to go extinct then you’re starting from a severe handicap if you do need to start growing in different regions. That’s why I think it’s important for folks like us to keep them alive. I don’t necessarily trust the government and the USDA to do it. I work for the government at a local level, and I see how much instability and turnover there is from one budget year to the next. I don’t mean this in a political way, but it’s very easy for things to get lost when the government is the caretaker.
Things have come and gone since the beginning of time, humankind had nothing to do with most of those extinctions. Nature is ever evolving. It looks for a better “inhabitant” for every niche in the biological world. Those species that exist do so because they are better able to adapt to the ever changing environment in which they live. It sickens me at times the amount of money spent to try and preserve the last of “X species”. Am I sad that things go extinct? Yes. Am I sad that humankind is responsible for some of those? Yes.
I would argue that better fruit is the result of all the laboratory breeding going on. Better by who’s determination? I don’t buy the latest and greatest grocery store variety fruit. I have no need to. I enjoy varieties that have been arounds for decades possibly even centuries just as much as anything that the grocery store tells me I should like better.
Not so much for fruit trees or other human food crops. It’s selection based on our personal choices, needs and economics. Many times by just a few people on behalf of the whole population. Doesn’t really matter if dinosaurs, or some bird in the Amazon went extinct and that’s not our fault. If we’re picking and choosing human food and we allow some of the important varieties of that food to go extinct then that’s on us. It’s one of the few things we can have an impact on as individuals. One random Joe could preserve something totally unique and valuable, and pass it on. And who knows when that food might be important. That’s pretty cool.
seeds, spread those seeds to people, even before it’s big enough to send cuttings.
The fact that so many people on here are fans of pluots, apriums, pluerries etc. speaks to and argument that I’ve had more that once with my Mom. Her father and grandfather were both ranchers whi maintained tens and sometimes hundreds of acres of Italian plums/prunes. I think @Justin has had some arguments about landrace fruits and new varieties but my Mom has made the point that virtually all of the new varieties her Dad and Grandfather introduced were sports or wild fencerow hybrids.
They left hundreds of trees around the orchards and along miles of roadways in Kellogg OR and if anyone spotted something new, something unusual or tried a large plum while chasing the cattle or sheep - if it was good they’d add it to a row in whatever the newest orchard was. The best of the best are what my Uncle maintains in VK’s Improved Umpqua Italian Plum. I have a tree now too. It’s my favorite.
So what’s that have to do with this? My Mom’s point is that there was most likely some archetypal common ancestor of the stone fruits. They were interspecific and could all interbreed - springing up new and wildly different varieties every generation, and they were hardier and more easily adapted to new areas.
Domestication messed this up in thay some people liked cherries and others liked peaches etc - so artificial genetic drift was introduced until they were separate species and had more difficulty hybridizing. Then Zaiger came along with his artificial process to force hybrids and from those we see numerous fruits that seem better than ever seen before, but these type were probably the norm 10000 years ago, and hardier and healthier. Inbreeding cause reinforcement of negative genetic mutations. Look at closed off populations of people and you see it. Same with fruits and vegetables. Outcrossing introduces “new” combinations, even if not new genes. I think that is going to be the future of this, maintaining varities that demonstrate desirable traits and crossing as many as possible to improve variability. Sadly there’s little commercial gain to that because so many people keep buying the tasteless nutrituonless watered down stuff at the grocery store.
Okay rant over. But i feel better.