You prefer to eat fresh fruit that is nearly 50% sugar 
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in 1804 you could buy trees to be sold in the Fall and shipped by boat to Philadelphia where i guess you had to figure it out from there.
Seems like there was a bigger selection then than nowā¦ 550 varieties at this nursery.
Would you rather grow these fruit trees or modern ones?
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How about 25%. And I eat more raw vegetables than fruit or at least as much. So itās eat less volume of better fruit. And any 25% sugar fruit is healthier than a pie with white flower, added sugar, and whatever else goes in a pie.
Pluots were just an example. There are many others. And pluots were bred for CA type climates. They canāt be expected to be ideal for Iowa or any other difficult climate. In Iowa grow corn and apples. Eat pluots from Costco. They try to bring in the best.
Or grow other adapted fruits. Iām eating Ponca blackberries right now. A new release from Arkansas. Itās wonderful. As good or better than any Iāve ever eaten.
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Peaches and cherries are in different subgenera within the Prunus genus. They have been diverging genetically for the last 34-56 million years. Humans had nothing to do with their inability to cross.
Even the Japanese plums bred by Burbank are far superior to the āpureā P. salicina Iāve had in Asia.
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I meant my post as a compliment at the brix you can achieve, not a dig at eating a lot of sugar.
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So much had been driven by commercialization and cultural changes.
Often the better product wins. At times it does not. Sometime, Google up superior products that that lost out to inferior ones due to inferior marketing. The list is long. Also, the definition of ābestā changes. It is often culturally prescribed.
On the farm it is similar. What is ābestā changes due to many factors. I have Dexter cows, which are arguably one of the best homestead cows out there. They are a dual purpose cow thatās been around for a long time. They have superior tasting milk and meat and are the ideal size for a family. However, they donāt produce enough milk to be competitive in commercial dairy and their slower growth rate and smaller size keep them largely out of the commercial meat market.
My meat chickens are better tasting, healthier and more āhumaneā (which is more marketing poly than anything) then the Cornish crosses sold, but they no longer meet the expectations of the current market. They take 3+ more weeks to grow before ready for market and the breast size is smaller.
Plants are no different. The wheat I grow is superior in some aspects to newer varieties but no longer meets the needs of the new cultural practices in the ag world of small grains.
I have never had strawberries so good as those sold farmside in central California, but you canāt buy them in stores, not even there.
I grow 7 varieties of apricots, from all over the world. I selected for late blooming to avoid frosts and for cold hardiness. When I moved to my father in laws farm, a few years ago, I found some unnamed apricots that were 100 years old that produce every year. They arenāt as sweet as many of todayās apricots, but they produce every year!
What is best can be determined by so many factors.
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Lolā¦Those Dexter Heifers are mean!!! Had a pair of Dexter Heifers get after us trying to catch two calves that were not even theirsā¦lol
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The American Chestnut is making a comeback. I doubt we will see them this size again.
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Have you done a blind taste test between your chickens and Cornish X you raised? Iāve seen a few tests where Cornish X, Rangers, and heritage breeds were cooked identically and blind tested and, to everyoneās surprise, Cornish X won across the board.
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There have been many blind tests done. Many, many more tests have been done that were non blinded. I personally think the non blinded studies should not be accepted as valid, even though their results generally agree with me. I have not yet done any trials but would like to.
I have seen both sides of the argument come out on top. I think that, in general, Cornish X has probably been on top more than non Cornish X. However, I think that based strictly on taste, heritage generally come out on top. The majority of Americans seen to prefer the texture of Cornish X, which are killed several weeks younger and are more tender. Even though texture/tenderness is not taste/flavor, it strongly skews the tests.
There are some non cornish X which are reaching harvest weight by 10 weeks, which is still much slower than Cornish X but much faster than most heritage breeds.
Many people have done much work with various breeds for many years. We are working with some heritage breeds and having good results. Iāll let you know where we end up. My own taste tests have biased greatly towards me, but that is expected.
If things keep progressing how have been, next year, we will invite everybody out to the farm for a big cookout and we can all see which we prefer. (Iāll kill a beef and a pig too so we can try lots of stuff)
Unfortunately, my orchard will be on itās first year and there wont be any fruit to share.
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It all depends on what people are selecting for, and what they consider āthe bestā. If the dairy industry had figured out how to speed up their selection for high volume (low quality) milk, we might have only A1A1 dairy cows in the US today. Unfortunately, a lot of people canāt deal with the mutated beta-casein in A1 milk, plus it causes juvenile diabetes. As it is, they are shooting themselves in the foot, driving people to switch to fake milks. Their gag order on the A2 Corporation means very very few people know what the problem is with grocery milk. When the diabetes connection to milk was discovered in New Zealand 20+ years ago, people were upset to hear their dairy industry and food choices could be causing illness and early death in children. But when a genetic test was used on NZās dairy bulls, they found that āthe bestā bulls didnāt carry the A1 mutation. NZ is a great place to grow grass, and is a good climate for dairy cattle, so they export a lot of dairy products. When you want to produce butter, cheese, powdered milk, condensed milk, for export, you donāt want to have to remove a lot of water. So in NZ the dairy industry had been selecting for āhigh componentsā, that is, high butterfat and protein.
And speaking of āwateryā, are you aware of trends in produce? I first heard about this in the 1970ās. An English āpotato crispā company realized that a drier potato could save them money on frying costs. They began paying farmers a premium for a variety of potato with a higher dry matter content. Yes, the bushels per acre were lower, but it was more efficient. The garden magazine with this story pointed out that home gardeners also might haul and store less water in their potato crop.
As a sweet potato experimenter, Iāve found the lists of dry matter content in GRIN. Sure Beauregard makes more bushels or lbs per acre than Nancy Hall, but itās got only 22-23% dry matter, compared to Nancy Hallās 35%. And Beauregardeās white sport, O Henry, makes closer to 18% dry matter, compared to Papota at 39% dry matter. Even though Papota converts a smaller percentage of itās starch to sugar in cooking, that sugar is right there on your tongue, not lost in watery flesh.
Iām sure that the most āproductiveā produce varieties, the ones industry goes for, are the most watery. In the old days of early hybrid corn, some varieties were known to āweigh heavyā or āweigh lightā, using volume measurement in bushels. I expect lightweight corn made more bushels per acre.
At Nafex meetings there were 2 distinct groups, and you wanted to know pretty quick which group a fellow Nafexer was in before you took his/her advice. One group wanted the best, and sprayed to get it. The other didnāt want chemicals in their food, and were willing to accept far lower quality (from a gourmet standpoint) from varieties that produced without chemicals.
I think that whenever there is a monetary system in place to reward food production, that there is always a tendency for people to game the system, intentionally or not. Going too long down any one road, or having too few people or groups deciding what it ābestā limits choices and veers the unfavored varieties or clones toward obscurity and extermination.
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I respect the opinions of all my fellow posters but Iām politely going to agree to disagree. I doubt the genetic drift was more than 10,000 years for these fruits. Although seed size is smaller, formation of the seed, hull, interspecific ability to cross, and the ability to graft indicate very very little genetic difference.
Again, not trying to start a fight. But I am sure we can agree, in many cases we have artificially selected for certain traits and created inbred populations of domesticated planta and animals that have suffered from reinforcement of negative genes as well.
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Just as wildlife rewarded apple trees smart enough to make a straight sweet apple long before man made them a crop.
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But variety was maintained by different types of wildlife. Birds prefer hawthorne and crab apple. Deer larger apples. Whereas for generations many humans have focused on selection that decreased variation.
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interesting, I grow Covington and Carolina Ruby both are so-so in terms of storage potential. I have grown some unknown grocery store varieties which stored well. Curious to know where can I find the dry matter information.
Give me the old varieties.
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Itās not my opinion. Itās what the genetic evidence tells us. The early Eocene divergence time is a conclusion by the authors of the attached paper, who are way more qualified to assess this than any of us are.
1-s2.0-S105579031400089X-main.pdf (3.5 MB)
Except peaches and cherries cross with difficulty and are mostly graft-incompatible. Whereas peaches and almonds are easy to cross and graft and belong to the same subgenus in Prunus.
Domestication inherently means there is a loss of genetic diversity in the domesticated species, since genes associated with undesirable traits are selected out. However, that doesnāt mean a domesticated crop is inbred. Inbreeding isnāt necessarily bad either. Itās a great way to remove alleles with negative effects from a population. Any plant that can self pollinate is inbred to some extent.
There are fewer generations separating many fruits like apples and grapes from their wild ancestors than you might think. Once we discovered vegetative propagation, we could keep propagating an individual plant for a thousand years, as is the case for some grape varieties.
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Thanks. Many of us will keep on preserving our Heritage crops regardless of what the experts espouse and claim. I was given the impression by experts Geneva rootstocks were the best around. So far G.214 is the worst root stock I have. Iāve talked to orchard owners who planted thousands of trees on Geneva stock and their orchards still had large die offs.
The things experts said about the pandemic has not helped their cause any.
You can dither with genomes to your heartās content. But it will never change how the genome is expressed.
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