Theoretical breeding projects (Zone 6a East Coast)

General Fruit Growing
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Theoretical breeding projects (Zone 6a East Coast):

Hi Everyone, I have been considering a few potential small scale amateur breeding projects and am curious on people’s thoughts in terms of if any are worth pursuing or if people would be curious about/interested in the results. I understand that, without large numbers, it is unlikely that anything meaningful would come of them, but I still think it would be an interesting experience and I am alright with potentially poor results.

Project 1: Cornelian cherry (long time frame 6 to 10 years to fruit from seed)

The thought would be to select 3 or 4 named varieties of cornelian cherry and then grow out around 12 seedlings to evaluate if seedlings show good sweetness to acid ratios. It seems that through named varieties the parent population might have brix values ranging from 12.7 to 9.6 and acid levels ranging from 1.2 to 1.7. If all went well, there is the potential to have various seedlings with brix to acid ratios of around 8 which should be alright/borderline for fresh eating. I have had frozen cornelian cherries and liked the taste enough to consider this project so, even in the worst-case scenario, I think I could find uses for the fruit. Positive aspects of cornelian cherry include that 1) it is reported to be resistant to pests and disease 2) it is somewhat slow growing so pruning will be less effort, 3) the breeding efforts seem to be relatively recent so there is likely room for improvement.

Project 2: Plums (middle time frame 3 to 7 years to fruit from seed)

There are issues with growing stone fruit on the east coast without spraying for pests and disease. That being said, some beach plums and American plums sound like they have good resistance to disease and some resistance to pests. The thought would be to 1) start by growing some plums like Toka, Lavina, and South Dakota that show resistance to black knot and other diseases, 2) then graft to those trees named varieties of beach plum or American plum, 3) then plant out seeds from the beach plum and American plum and graft the seedlings to the parent trees. Overtime, the seedlings would hopefully inherit favorable traits like good flavor and freestone from the named plums and disease/pest resistance from the beach plum and American plum. The main risk of this plan is that potentially none of the plums have enough pest resistance, so plum curculio might ruin the project. If all went well, a no spray plum that is acceptable for fresh eating and good for processing would be nice for backyard growers.

Project 3: Goumi (middle time frame 3 to 10 to fruit from seed)

Goumi seems to be a no care plant that produces fruit that some people enjoy eating fresh. There are a few named varieties such as Tillamook/Carmine, Red Gem, and Sweet Scarlet. The thought is that there does not seem to be a large number of varieties available so there could be room for improvement. There might be value in planting out a number of seedlings of the named varieties and seeing if there is notable variation in astringency, sweetness, tartness, size, or ripening time. The main positive aspects of this project are the following 1) goumi seems to be pest and disease resistant, 2) the plants don’t seem to grow very tall so pruning is likely not a huge issue, 3) there might be room for improvement. Risks for this project include that 1) I have not tried goumi yet so I’m just working off of feedback in the forum 2) there are limited cultivars to start with in the US and brix/acid information is limited, 3) there is the potential for cross pollination with feral Elaeagnus which could create a plant that has the potential to be invasive or just generally carry less desirable traits.

Overall thoughts:

Cornelian cherry and goumi are basically projects that start with fairly disease/pest resistant plants and try to find improved varieties. The main risk is that seedling fruit quality could just be poor overall. Contrastingly, plums are likely good for fresh eating, but I have concerns that the pest pressure will be too high to really make any progress on a no spray plum for the East Coast.

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Very nice projects! These are very similar ideas to what I have started doing a decade ago, although I started with different species like apples, Feijoa’s and plums. I have no university degree in this, but as an interested amateur I do have spent a lot of thought on these small scale breeding projects and I do have over ten years of experience.

My thoughts on your projects are:

Simplicity: yes it really is that simple and it seems you got all the right ideas. Chances are very good that you will find a good deal of variation already in small populations of between 12 and 24 plants (but of the same cross)

Your choice of parents seem to be well thought out, so no problem there, but don’t underestimate the timeline. I don’t mind, I know it is a long term project, but for most crosses it actually took me up to ten years to get the parent varieties I wanted growing and flowering in my garden. In the mean time I already started sowing open pollinated seeds and that taught me a lot about disease pressure and the percentage of losses that I would have while growing out one generation.

It is actually nicer to have a ‘lethal’ selection pressure that can kill off an entire generation, because it makes the plants that you find that do survive really different and valuable. And my hunch is that that will happen often enough with the plums that you want to try.
On the other hand to grow out (and I did this several years in a row) 12 plants per year, and to have to water, weed and care for these and then to evaluate them all only to find that they all have a similar ok but not great taste is somehow less rewarding. For that reason as well I would do controlled crosses, because seen the time that this will take anyway, the information that you gain from knowing that one parent or type of cross gives a much higher percentage of sweeter seedlings is worth a lot 7 years from now.

But great projects and you can only gain by doing them, I think. Don’t be afraid to lose a lot of plants, that is rather a sign of success, that actual selection is taking place, than of failure.

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Thank you for your thoughts! I agree ultimate timelines will definitely be extensive. I’m planning to do these just as a hobby and figure I could see what happens over 20-30 years.

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I have cornelian cherries. They are often claimed to be disease and pest free that isn’t entirely true. I have seen insect damage on the leaves and I have had fruit damaged by what appeared to be some type of fungal infection. Generally it has been light but these issues exist. The trees are slow growing so I think your timeline is a bit optimistic. You could speed it up by grafting scionwood or budding on already established trees or established rootstocks. The wood of cornelian cherry is pretty hard so grafting or budding isn’t going to be easy. But I think buying 3 or 4 trees and seeing how they do is pretty reasonable. I do eat the fruit fresh but there is a narrow window of time the fruit can be eaten fresh.

I don’t have plums but I do have sweet cherries and tart cherries. All stone fruits are vulnerable to brown rot to a certain degree. Many organic growers ultimately start using synthetic fungicides because of brown rot. I don’t think resistance will be high enough to avoid spraying for brown rot in the East for plums. Here is a primer for brown rot.

Brown rot on American Plum
https://apsjournals.apsnet.org/doi/10.1094/PHP-07-22-0061-BR

Beach Plum and brown rot
https://blogs.cornell.edu/treefruit/production/beach-plum/disease-management/

There isn’t really resistance to insects like plum curculio. That is true for stone fruit and apples. You have three choices to control it, bag the fruit, spray surround (a type of clay) or spray an insecticide.

You might consider apples if you want breeding program. With a dwarfing rootstock like Bud 9 you speed up the process quite a bit by grafting your seedling apples to Bud 9 so fruiting happens earlier saving time. You probably are thinking there are thousands of apples why breed more? Well I think apples have a couple of things going for them. You can easily get disease resistant parents and there is wide variety of characteristics. I don’t think it worthwhile to breed a honeycrisp replacement since professional breeders have planted thousands of seedlings in an attempt to do just that. But something like a disease resistance apple crossed with a russet or crossed with an unusual apple ( red fleshed, unusual taste, etc.) would be worth doing.

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@mroot Thank you for your thoughts! It makes sense that cornelian cherries will show some leaf and fruit damage for various reasons, but it is good to hear that it is generally light. I suspect that this will be similar for goumi where the plants will be impacted by something just hopefully not in a major way. Concerning plums, you are reinforcing my main concern which is that I’m probably overestimating the pest and disease resistance of the native plums. I think it might make sense to skip the plum project and focus on the other two. For timeline, I agree that these will likely be extensive.

I didn’t list this as a project, but last season I purchased heirloom apples and did a tasting. After that, I put the cores in some pots and left outside to see if anything will sprout this spring. One pot had mainly golden russet and wickson cores so if I get any seedlings from that I plan to put those on Bud 9 to see how they turn out. This isn’t really a strategic project because I do not know the pollinator but, given that the mother plants have valuable traits (high brix and good flavor), I figured it would interesting.

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@mroot I was reading back through the cornelian cherry topics and saw that you mentioned that you grow both Elegant (elehantnyi) and Yellow (yantarnyi). Do you find that the fruit damage is worse for one over the other?

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For cornelian cherries, there is a reason they aren’t more common. I think there are better fruits to select. Also, there are tons of varieties available, if it were me I would just do a trial of lots of varieties rather than try to breed new ones. I just don’t think there is room for improvement. I would say the same about goumi
On the other hand I believe there is always progress to be made with plums. Disease resistants, later blooming, different textures, flavors and just about anything else. I just think plums are worth the effort and cornelian cherries and goumi’s are not.

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I think the damage is similar. I don’t think disease resistance differs between them as far as I can tell.

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Good move. Native plums get curculio and moths and rots just as bad as any other plum. You can find native plums without many issues but it is because they got lucky… isolated from the bad stuff.

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I think hybridizing goumi and autumn olive could be fruitful.

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I think breeding plums to improve them is a worthwhile project for a hobbyist. But I think trying to improve their resistance to the point you wouldn’t need to spray for brown rot under Eastern conditions is beyond the resources available to a hobbyist.

The difficulty is probably similar to what was needed to find the scab resistance Vf gene in apples. Which wasn’t in domestic apples but instead in a different species in the malus genus. You would need to plant thousands of seedlings and screen them for brown rot. You probably wouldn’t find strong enough brown rot resistance but you might. If you didn’t then you would look for wild specimens (in the prunus genus) and try to find resistance there using a similar approach. Your not going find that level of resistance by planting 50 seedlings in your backyard.

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@ribs1 I agree cornelian cherries are generally not very popular in the US and the eating quality will likely be lower than the more traditional fruits. I plan to start with around 4 named varieties so that will be a bit of a trial so I should get a good sense of the ones that are available and their traits before starting a seedling project. I will do the same thing with goumi.

Plums have great eating quality and much more interest, but it does seem like I am probably being unrealistic about no spray plums on the east coast. Rather than remove the project completely I think that I will just scale it down and just have a couple plum trees that can be parent trees and hold the seedlings as grafts.

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@mroot Thank you for letting me know.

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@scottfsmith This makes sense. I was hoping that, given that the prunus genus is so broad and that there is good diversity in the native plums, there would be notable resistance somewhere in the genus. It seems that I likely was being too optimistic. I’m thinking that, if I only have a couple plum trees, I might be able to avoid attracting large pest pressure so I might do that but given the feedback I will probably avoid planting many plum trees.

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@hobilus Autumn olive is considered invasive in my area so I wouldn’t be looking to try this but I’m sure there could be merit in trying this where there aren’t local restrictions.

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@mroot I agree that, in theory, it should be possible to locate a plum that has the resistance in a native population and then breed that into plums with better fruit quality. Likely I just won’t have the scale to do this.

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Moniz would be a good starting point. Goumi Berry

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I think the first (cherry) and third (goumi) sound the best! As much as I like plums, I see a lot of sad gross looking dropped plum fruit on native trees. I hardly ever see fruit get close to ripe - they’re hit pretty hard by something. Maybe PC or stinkbugs or who knows.

I think it would be important to know about the genetics, pollination, and breeding attempts so far for these species. Some things are easier to hybridize and also to breed true and/or graft than others. You should focus on the ones that are most promising.

Also, I’m interested in joining your 3rd project!

Much of my property is invaded by autumn olive and I have wondered about trying goumi since autumn olive does so well here. Also, perhaps grafting to autumn olive or trying to cross autumn olives that have the best taste.

I have slowly been evaluating my autumn olive plants. There is about 1 in 20 with fruit I would eat fresh. Lots of variability in flavor from plant to plant.

This would be a risk where I am. I can’t find any easy info on whether they cross. I also know that goumi and autumn olive ripen at different times (autumn olive in autumn - here it is quite late, with a long window. Like october-nov). I don’t know if their bloom times differ autumn olive is early april for me- I don’t have goumi so can’t comment on their bloom time.

I am also in somewhat harsh growing and fruiting conditions (high pH alkaline soil, high pest pressure, oddly variable weather because of the valley), so it might be worth it for me and for people like @clarkinks to have something that is a bit undesirable for others in terms of feral-ness.

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@SMC_zone6 Moniz definitely looks like a good variety based on the description. Have you tried this variety?

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@benthegirl I agree that, after seeing the feedback, the first and third project look to be the most worthwhile. Plums are very tempting given how nice the fruit can be, but it sounds like there are a lot of challenges even when growing the native plums. If I had more land to experiment with, I would really like to try planting many goose plum seedlings to identify a highly disease resistant and pest resistant plum ( Seeds – OIKOS Tree Crops) to then cross with freestone plums that have some disease resistance to get an east coast friendly backyard plum. That being said, I probably will just focus on cornelian cherry and goumi.

For cornelian cherry, there have been breeding efforts in Ukraine and Poland. There is pretty good reference material on the characteristics of some of the varieties. A lot of information is outlined in the cornelian cherry topics: Sweetest Cornus Mas Cornelian Cherry? - General Fruit Growing - Growing Fruit and Cornelian Cherry - Yea or Nay? - General Fruit Growing - Growing Fruit. I think that cornelian cherry is generally hard to graft but there is reference material on the best ways to do it.

For goumi, I have not found a lot of breeding documentation and there is a more limited number of varieties available How many Goumi varieties are there and which is the sweetest? - General Fruit Growing - Growing Fruit.

I found a couple discussions on grafting goumi to autumn olive and there have been both successes and failures reported How many Goumi varieties are there and which is the sweetest? - General Fruit Growing - Growing Fruit. If you are interested in goumi anyway you could probably get a couple goumi plants and then try to graft cuttings of those plants to your autumn olives as the original goumi plants get larger (basically growing your own scions).

Seedlings, in general, have potential to find a variety that does well in your conditions so that is one cool thing about trying to grow out seedlings, though they likely will have more feral type traits because some of the traits of the named varieties are likely to be lost.

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