I will post detailed information later this season but generally speaking they are smaller than Daiougoumi. Similarish to Carmine, Carmine is ripe this weekend, then I can tell for sure.
Anyways they are sweeter than Daiougoumi, especially AM3 & AM4.
I am looking for a longer season, sweeter and firmer fruit. Longtime I obviously would love to get Sth bigger than than Daiougoumi. Or at least an improved Daiougoumi. sweeter and better transportable with a longer shelf life.
There is an observation I want to share.
So on Monday we did an tasting.
Turns out 6 people recognized an unusual tropical scent in Oburkhivska. Breeding this into a bigger and sweeter fruit is on my mind now too.
Is Oburkhivska correct spelling? It is ŠŠ±ŃŃ ŃŠ²ŃŃŠŗŠ° in Ukrainian and if I put that in google translate it is translated as Obukhivska.
I look forward to taste that variety, I have a few berries on my plant but they are not ripe yet here in Denmark.
Here is some data on the seedlings.
Itās worth noting that this season has been unusually dry in my area, with only 329 mm of precipitation recorded since the beginning of the year.
In a more humid year or with regular irrigation, I can imagine the fruit wight could increase by up to 30%.
Hereās a video comparing Carmine Goumi with my seedlings.
To be fair, weāre experiencing a drought this year, which has impacted fruit development. Based on the data @MichaelL shared earlier in this thread, my Goumis are generally about 30ā40% lighter this season. That said, Daiougoumi handled the drought quite well, producing fruits with an average weight of 4.6g.
Iād hardly call āCarmineā overhyped. It is a great selection; highly productive with good sized fruit of good flavor. If you have developed other great new varieties that is good, but that doesnāt negate from how good āCarmineā is. Your description of the quality of the āCarmineā fruit as watery and mushy doesnāt sound like what myself or most other people have experienced. Not sure why that would be.
Hi @JohannsGarden ,
I see your point, and I appreciate your perspective. Like I mentioned earlierājust to be fairāweāre dealing with drought conditions, so itās certainly not showing its best quality right now. That said, it has underperformed compared to nearly all my other Goumi plants. It is in its third year, grafted onto a strong rootstock.
In terms of flavor, brix, and texture, Iād honestly rank it quite low among my cultivars and seedlings. I was genuinely disappointed. On the bright side, itās a heavy producerāthatās definitely one of its strong suits.
And yes, Iāll admit the video was meant to be a little provocative. Carmine is one of the most sought-after cultivars, but apart from the fruit size, I find it quite underwhelming.
The main point Iām trying to make is: we need to focus more on growing seedlings. Thereās still a lot of room for improvement in Goumi fruitāitās truly a low-hanging fruit in terms of breeding potential these days.
I donāt give as much weight to brix because you have to use a tool to measure that rather than just use your taste buds. How sweet a fruit tastes is affected by the balance between sugar and acid, so a lower acid fruit can sometimes taste sweeter than a higher acid fruit even if the lower acid fruit has a lower brix.
Iād love for more people to grow and evaluate goumi seedlings like you are doing. However, I would hope the result is more diversity of flavors, but not because āCarmineā is in any way lacking. Itās just fun to have variety.
I have a question to goumi specialists: Are there really self-fertile varieties or are sellers lying about it? I bought a polish variety called Dr Szczepan 6 years ago and it never bore any fruit. This year, while both were in flower I hastily planted a Cherrific cultivar next to it, and got fruit for the first time.
I agree that āCarmineā appears to be self fertile. I also suspect āPippiā is self fertile, but havenāt 100% confirmed that. Meanwhile, only a small percentage of the flowers on my āSweet Scarletā set fruit each year despite having access to cross pollination, so Iām guessing that one is not self fertile. Looks like thereās enough genetic variation between clones for it to go either way with this species.
I always find your goumi updates interesting. One thing to keep in mind is that Carmine, Sweet Scarlet, and Red Gem are the three easily available cultivars in the US for people looking to buy plants. Some others are periodically available in limited quantities or as scion wood for grafting. Given this, I think that the fruit size and high production are why it would have been very sought after as compared to the other two that have smaller fruit. Your seedlings are turning out to have really good traits and they probably would get a lot of attention just as Carmine got a lot of attention relative to Sweet Scarlet and Red Gem.
I still appreciate seeing brix figures when available and in combination with commentary on flavor. There is value in quantifiable data because it gives something to compare that isnāt completely subjective. For example, you might like the taste of Carmine more than another grower but that could be because your environment is allowing the fruit to attain higher sugar and a higher brix. That would be pretty apparent if you measured brix and it was higher than the brix measured by the other grower. Also, brix alone wonāt answer the question of flavor but it still gives a data point to consider when evaluating new varieties. Iād always prefer more data points than less when seeing documentation of breeding experiments or lesser known varieties.
I agree that itās good to have more data in general, and I hope it didnāt sound like I was making a statement against collecting data. My point is that higher brix is not a reason to consider a particular cultivar better than another. It doesnāt directly translate to how sweet or not sweet a fruit tastes, and for that matter, a sweeter tasting fruit isnāt by default better tasting than a less sweet fruit. As I mentioned above, acid also comes into play, but itās actually more complicated than that since brix measures the soluble solids in the juice. Soluble solids are not only sugars, but rather can include any other parts of the fruit which are water soluble. Additionally, brix doesnāt factor in the ratio of juice to non-juice portions of the fruit and the sugar content of the non-juice parts of the fruit may not be equal to that which is in the liquid portions.
Yes, brix is a data point. A fun one at that. Not worth assigning too much weight to though.
I agree that higher brix doesnāt make one cultivar better than another. My post was just to encourage Austrian_FruitNut to keep posting and measuring brix because I find it interesting and do think that there is value in the data. Also, on the topic of Carmine, I had my tillamook fruit this year and one strange thing that happened to me was that my first round of harvests had somewhat mild flavored berries that easily had the flesh pull from the pit and stem. Meaning that if I held the stem and used my fingers to lightly run along the fruit skin the skin and flesh easily came off the pit and stem leaving the pit still attached to the stem. I harvested much of the fruit and noted these traits. Then after a week, I harvested the fruit that I had kept under some netting (I netted only two branches this year). The fruit from that harvest was much more firm and would detach from the stem rather than have the flesh and skin easily pull off the pit and stem. The fruit was also a bit more astringent. It was also interesting because in both cases I harvested fruit at different stages of ripeness (meaning some were fully red, some were still not fully red, some had likely been red for a week or two). The main difference was that the second round was harvested after a very hot week in which temperatures reached around 100. It could be the case that the weather caused the increase in firmness and astringency. It could also be the case that just netting the fruit caused a difference by shading the fruit or some other mechanism. I really wondered about it because Iād say that you could have convinced me that I ate two different varieties between the two weeks as the fruit was so different.
My first thought was āHow much shade was that net casting?ā
I appreciate you offering encouragement for @Austrian_FruitNut. I hope my dialogue did not come across as discouraging for them. I donāt doubt they are getting some very worthwhile breeding done. I just donāt think āCarmineā deserved to be dissed on like that, and have never seen any āhypeā around it that could even make it possible for it to be āover-hyped.ā Then again, Iām only thinking of what Iāve read in English and hadnāt considered that it actually might be getting over hyped in German (the most spoken language in Austria).
