I hope that I could score gold! These are my proprietary SunRose Peacharine seeds about to germinate. I pollinated a selected amount of flowers with F1 Moorpark Apricot Pollen.
Sounds yummy to me!
If I get a Peacharinecot tree from one of these two seeds, I hope that it bears great tasting fruit.
Have you successfully crossed varieties in the past? My limited understanding has always been that the odds of a seedling like this producing good fruit was very small. It would be great if your experience showed that to be incorrect!
It is a process. Professional breeders will generate about a hundred offspring in each breeding cycle. Sometimes nature provides an instant winner, but more often a truly amazing fruit comes after many cycles of inner breeding back-and-forth with meticulous records of parentage. Some of Zaiger’s better known fruits have been decades in the making – and as a counter example a few of them were instant winners.
I applaud Ulises in his efforts. In him I see the enthusiasm of my ancestors.
Zaiger has about 250,000 offspring they are evaluating at any one time. They won’t have that many if finding truly superior new cultivars were easy. In fact I’m thinking based on their recent releases, at least for retail sales, that they’ve run up against the odds. Most of their recent releases IMO have been considerably behind the early stuff like Flavor King and Flavor supreme. So they have 250,000 to chose from and can’t find anything superior to sell to home growers. There must be something in there that isn’t commercially viable yet tastes great. Still I haven’t seen it. Probably there are hundreds that are good but finding the one is really difficult.
My first sucessful varieties that I crossed is the peacharinecot and the peachmond.
Structured breeding programs produce geometrically more offspring each year until you hit midpoint, then taper down again at the same rate. Such was the case with the program begun by Howard Frost in 1905 at Rubidoux which ended in the 1980’s – several decades after his passing. From it we have a handful of “winners”, including Gold Nugget Mandarin.
Having seen a portion of Zaiger’s operation (it is multinational) I expect the 250k tree population number could be correct, but I don’t believe they are all end products – but rather mid-stream in their process.
Even if I don’t get a great tasting peacharinecot, I could use it as a breeding stock until I get a winner hybrid.
Anyone familiar with a description of the current state of the art in fruit breeding techniques?