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When I first heard about the 'Explorer' primocane-fruiting black raspberry, I was convinced it was the first such variety. As it turned out, I was wrong, as numerous such cultivars existed by the turn of the century, although very few ever achieved any importance.

An exception to this, however, is the very first primocane-fruiting black raspberry, 'Ohio Everbearing'. Although not a major commercial success, this variety remains significant as one of the very first cultivated American selections of Rubus, and probably the first named black cap (given the abundance of wild black raspberries, it probably took an unusual trait such as fall-fruiting to warrant a name and cultivation).

'Ohio Everbearing' was discovered in the wild by Nicholas Longworth. Longworth was a self-made millionaire banker from Cincinnati, which in 1804 when he moved there was almost the western frontier. Although his family remained important in local and U.S. politics, and he left an estate worth $10 million when he died in 1863, Longworth's most lasting legacy is as a horticulturist. Often called "The Father of American Viticulture" (a title sometimes applied to his correspondent, John Adlum), Longworth was an avid collector and disseminator of fruit varieties. He championed first the 'Alexander' and then the 'Catawba' grapes and introduced at least one strawberry of his own creation.


Everbearing Black Caps listed in Fred Card's
Bush Fruits (1920)
American Everbearing
Cottier Everbearing
[Grigg's] Daily Bearing
Earhart
Everlasting
Every Day
Fadely
General Negley
Hixon's Everbearer
Kagy Everbearing
King of Cliff's
Lum's Autumn Black Raspberry
Miller's Daily Bearing
Munson's Everbearing
Mystery
Ransom's Everbearing
Sweet Home
Wonder
Longworth found the original 'Ohio Everbearing' somewhere in central Ohio, where he had retreated in the fall of 1832 to escape cholera outbreaks in Cincinnati. Despite it being September or October, he "found a raspberry in full bearing, a native of our state, the only everbearing raspberry I have ever met with. I introduced it the same winter into my garden, and it is now cultivated by me in preference to all others, and my table is supplied from the beginning of June to frost." Although the variety struggled somewhat on the gravelly soils of his fields, it performed better on clay soils, and Longworth was convinced it might have a future, especially in England. He sent plants there, as did A.J. Downing, though it seems have had little impact there. The legendary Dr. Hogg did note its existence in England as late as 1884, when it was probably gone in the U.S. (Incidentally, in my hypothetical strawberry-themed band, my stage name was going to be "Dr. Hogg").

Longworth was among the foremost horticultural authorities of his day, and an everbearing variety of raspberry would seem to be a major development, so it seems like it should have caught on, but while he and a few others cultivated it commercially, it never seems to have. Black caps, in general, have never attained commercial prominence, perhaps because they were foreign to European tastes, and thus unable to compete with the more familiar red raspberries. Many other everbearers, such as 'Grigg's Daily Bearing', 'Miller's Daily Bearing', and 'Lum's Autumn Black' were selected from its seedlings. (Indeed, I rather suspect most, if not all, of those everbearing black raspberries that appeared in the second half of the nineteenth century may claim it as an ancestor. Most of these seem to originate in Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, or Illinois, the areas nearest the discovery and commercialization of Longworth's variety).

I recently came across this fairly thorough discussion of Syzygium species from the Philippines on the blog Market Manila, with the common names "makopa" and "tambis". The discussion features a number of photos and spans three posts:

Tambis / Makopa / Curacao or Malay Apple
The Tambis (Syzygium Aqueum) Chronicles, Take II…
Tambis & Makopa Side By Side…

I don't really know much about the Myrtaceae. I was reminded of these posts because Syzygium sounded kind of like Ziziphus, and had it in my head that the two fruits looked kind of alike (although not so much, now that I look at them again). I thought maybe they were related, but no, not remotely--they're not even in the same order.

I just came across an interesting tidbit on the nomenclature of the cultivated jujube (mostly on an obscure corner of the internet called Wikipedia...)

Ever since I learned the jujubes were actual fruit and not just a type of candy, I've been using Ziziphus jujube as the Latin name (now, granted, it's not like the Latin binomial for jujube comes up in my daily conversation that much). Well, apparently I'm a little bit behind the times, because the name seems to have been Ziziphus zizyphus since 1882.

I personally am so easily amused that this alone would be adequate to entertain me, but the story of how it wound up with that name is kind of interesting as well. In general, tautonyms (those in which the genus and species names are identical), while permitted in zoological nomenclature (hence Gorilla gorilla and Iguana iguana) are no good in botanical names. However, this one skated by on a technicality.

It was Mr. Taxonomy himself, Carolus Linnaeus, who gave the species its first modern binomial, Rhamnus zizyphus, placing it in the same genus as the buckthorns. However, in 1768 Philip Miller (a late and reluctant adopter of Linneaus' binomial system) decided it was sufficiently different to merit a separate genus, and gave it the name Ziziphus jujube. Why he changed it from a 'y' to an 'i' is unclear--it might well have been a typographical error. However, the arcane rules of taxonomy dictated that because Ziziphus and zizyphus were the first validly published and described names, and were not actually in violation of the tautonym rule thanks to the spelling difference, and thus the appropriate name, so in 1882 the name was changed to Ziziphus zizyphus.

And yes, I realize I'm probably one of about three people who found that interesting.

Not real fancy, but still kind of nice. I can appreciate any attempt to get kids interested in horticulture. It held my two-year-old's attention for nearly a minute, which is about 45 seconds longer than almost anything else I've tried this afternoon.

A Tree Grows in Danvers (USDA-ARS)

I was pleased to find a note in my e-mail this morning from Pete Tallman, developer of the 'Explorer' black raspberry. I mentioned 'Explorer' two years ago (have I really been at this that long?) as an exciting development in a crop in which very little breeding has been done (and, frankly, very little breed success obtained).

Unfortunately, 'Explorer' has not really been a success. I've seen it twice, both times under tunnels: once in Pennsylvania, where it had virtually no fruit and a powdery mildew problem, and another time in upstate New York, where the plants looked healthier but fruit set was still poor, though better. I was rather disappointed, as I'd been pretty excited about the thing.

Tallman's message today explains a big part of the problem: 'Explorer' is not self-fertile. Apparently his field featured things that flowered and provided adequate pollen at the right time, so the problem was never evident under his conditions. This fits with what I saw: the tunnel at Penn State where I saw it had, if I recall, only one other variety in it, while the one in NY, where it had at least some fruit, had several.

While unfortunate, this isn't entirely shocking, as self-incompatibility is fairly common among wild, diploid Rubus, and 'Explorer' is not far removed from the wild source of the primocane-fruiting trait that Tallman discovered. (Not surprisingly, the trait hasn't persisted very long in most commercial types).

Anyway, all is not lost. Tallman has selected another primocane-fruiting black raspberry, dubbed PT-2A4, which does pass the self-compatibility test, and has other desirable traits compared to 'Explorer'. As he describes it:
"Compared to Explorer, the PT-2A4 berries are larger, higher drupelet count, and smaller seeds. PT-2A4 holds my all-time record for a single primocane black raspberry at 3.82 grams. Admittedly, that's a max berry, not an average, but I gotta track something, and average isn't awfuly interesting. Maybe with a little fertilizer this year I could break 4 grams. Unfortuantely, PT-2A4 hasn't captured the reduced thorniness of Explorer, so there remains further breeding down the road to see if I can tie that trait back in again."

He also included a link to his website, which includes a page for PT-2A4.

Five new rootstocks from Andy Walker's breeding program at UC-Davis (cleverly named GRN-1 through 5):

New nematode resistant rootstocks for 2008 (Western Farm Press)

I was particularly pleased to see that GRN-1 is a hybrid of bunch grape and muscadine. Despite lots of talk about Euvitis/Muscadinia hybrids, there really haven't been many releases (I can only think of this and 'Southern Home', as well as maybe a few germplasm releases).

I don't know nearly as much about grape rootstock breeding as I do about the above ground part, but I always enjoy seeing how much wild material is used, and the completely different selection of species they're dealing with: V. champinii, rufotomentosa, monticola, rotundifolia, rupestris, and berlandieri, just in these five releases. Some of these (especially the first three) rarely if ever occur in the pedigrees of fruiting vines.

Well, I know I've been a bit scarce lately...between the holidays and everything else my mind's just been elsewhere. But I made a sort of New Year's resolution to keep this thing going, so I sat down to write a new post...

...and instead I re-did the blog template. Hopefully everyone likes it. I don't really know HTML that well, and there are still lingering issues (expect tinkering here and there for a while). There wasn't really a grand vision or anything--I just started screwing around with things.

The first thing you'll probably notice is the second sidebar. I decided to do this because to put everything in the one sidebar meant that useful things frequently got buried way, way down at the bottom. I may have somewhat reduced the impact of this by interspersing the fruit watercolors (from the USDA collection), but I thought they looked cool, and they kind fixed my problem with the grey not going down to the very bottom of the page like I wanted. I know things are a little more cluttered now...but hopefully not unreadably so.

Probably the biggest addition is the "Books" section in the sidebar. These are books about fruit and breeding that I've found interesting over the years (I don't actually own all of them, but I do most, and I've at least looked at all of them). The titles link to their respective Amazon pages (although some are out of print, and so your only hope is going to be a used copy). In the interest of full disclosure: I am a part of the Amazon Associates program, and get a cut (a very small cut) of anything you buy through these links. I have mixed feelings about this, since I didn't create this blog with the intention of making money (and what a fool I'd have been if I had!). But I do have a few costs here and there (domain name registration, for example) and a couple of bucks would provide me a little more incentive to keep things going around here when things get slow. I've been approached several times about placing ads on the site, but I've always turned them down. This way I keep control of what gets advertised, and hopefully people find some interesting or useful books. (It's kind of a pain to set up the links, so I have to admit I didn't put a ton of care into their organization or selection. I'll keep adding and arranging this section over time. If you have any suggestions you'd like added, let me know).

Anyway, hope everyone had a happy holidays, and hopefully you'll be seeing a little more of me. Please let me know if the new layout has screwed something up for you, or if you hate it or would like to see other enhancements.

Update: I've checked the new template in Safari, two versions of Firefox, and Flock. I'll check it in Chrome and Explorer when I get to work on Monday, but frankly I don't hold out a lot of hope for Explorer...the site's always looked kind of crappy on it, and I doubt this made it any better.

Found this today thanks to the wonder of Google News:

Banana Shortage? Nothing to Worry About (Medicine Hat News)

This of course misunderstands (or maybe just ignores) the biggest threat posed by banana diseases. Pesticides and cultural practices can probably preserve banana production for those of us in developed countries, where a few cents difference in price doesn't even register. But bananas are also a staple crop for millions of people, many of whom are already in a very precarious position. Even a slight decrease in yield could mean going hungry, or it could also mean the elimination of the what little surplus they had to barter or sell to buy other supplies, pay for schooling or medicine, etc.

(Sorry I haven't been around--just been distracted.)

Hi, my name is Adam, and I have a Death Knight. I’m writing this post as a helpful guide to starting out with the Death Knight class, for others going into it blind like I did. It’s not about spoilers or walkthroughs, just those little things that were not immediately obvious.

Some miscellaneous points of interest:

• You are confined to the Death Knight starting area until you complete the initial quest line.
• You will replace all your green starter gear with blue gear by the time you finish. This can be a nice gauge of progress. (”Two items left, almost done!”)
• You will get an epic (100% speed increase) ground mount as a quest reward.
• You will always have access to the Runeforges in Ebon Hold through Death Gate. During specific quest line events, the Runeforges will not function. Don’t worry about it, they’ll be back.
• When you finish the last quest in your faction’s capital city, go to Outland. You should be level 58, and you’re going to destroy anything you come across in Hellfire Peninsula.
• Professions
  • You will get First Aid level 270 for free, with Heavy Runecloth Bandage as an orange skill.
  • You will have the Journeyman riding skill.
  • Everything else has to start from Level 1. Enjoy grinding skillups!
• You get all the Eastern Kingdom and Kalimdor flight paths for free.
• You start with 10 Black Mushrooms, and these cannot be purchased from vendors. Send them to other characters for Tastes Like Chicken and the ilk.

And finally, notes about specific quests:

Quest: Grand Theft Palomino

Bring the horse back to Salanar, then look for a button in your new vehicle action bar for turning in the horse.

Quest: Into the Realm of Shadows

The Dark Riders were hotly contested when I did this, but they do spawn in the town. I just hung out where I initially picked up my horse.

Quest: A Special Surprise

Dialog is a big part of this quest. When you enter the prison house, you’re looking for an NPC of your race. Listen to what he has to say. You’ll know when to head back to Plaguefist.

Quest: An End to All Things…

When you’re done destroying stuff, return to The Lich King and dismount using the “Leave Vehicle” button in your toolbar.

Quests: The Lich King’s Command and The Light of Dawn

During this quest you’ll see two NPC counters and a timer at the top of your screen. If the event is already in progress, or seems to have stopped, just hang out by Browman’s Mill (or maybe even further back, I’m not sure how big the compeltion radius is) and wait for it to reset. It really is epic, do yourself a favor and experience the whole thing.

Several of us grouped which turned out to be unnecessary, and another Death Knight showed up after all the dialog and got quest credit for the whole thing. Nice time saver, but wait for the reset if you care about lore.

That’s It

Have fun. I am.

I just discovered that just about every article ever in the Journal of Genetics is available online! (I say "just about", because they appear to have missed a couple). The Journal of Genetics was the site of some of the great early articles in fruit genetics, and by virtue of being so darn old, people rarely seem to have copies of them floating around, so the fact that they are now just a click away is pretty darn cool.

I was also interested to note that the Journal of Genetics followed editor J.B.S. Haldane (yes, that Haldane) to India when he moved there in 1957--so the journal is currently published by the Indian Academy of Sciences.

Anyway, as an example of the goodies lurking in depths of the Journal of Genetics, I present one of my favorite series of papers, by C.W. Richardson. They're favorites for two reasons. First, they were some of the first attempts at serious genetics in strawberries, a crop that is near and dear to my heart. But second, and frankly more importantly, they have some of the least informative titles ever. I always hate when I have to cite them, because I always have to actually pull out the papers and look through them, because its impossible to remember which facts go with which...

A Preliminary Note on the Genetics of Fragaria (1914)
A Further Note on the Genetics of Fragaria (1918)
Some Notes on Fragaria (1920)
Notes on Fragaria (1923)*

* This last one, unfortunately, is one of the ones they seem to have missed scanning--there's a link, but no PDF.

Update: A friend of mine found the missing paper! It's been accidentally included at the end of the previous article! (Just scroll down...)

I think we found Marshall’s Halloween costume:

(MC Frontalot photo by quinnums, Creative Commons by-cc-na 2.0.)

I just had my first 'Winter Banana' apple (and am about halfway through my second), from a local ranch just up the road from where I work. It's really good! I worried a little bit about an apple with "winter" in the name--I thought maybe it suggested an apple selected for its storage potential, not flavor. But the concern was unwarranted. The flesh was fine-grained and crisp but gave easily. The flavor was sweet and mild, and the mild aroma, while not to me particularly reminiscent of banana, was unusual and distinct, though not intrusive.

Plus, it's a beautiful apple. Medium-size, glossy, green with a striking red blush covering maybe a third of the surface. Apparently it was once a fruit-basket favorite because of its good looks. I bought three of them, so I've saved one and maybe I'll take a picture of it for you.

I've seen a handful of stunted twisted apples near beaches over the years, but never anything with fruit that could rival the Aldeburgh beach apple:

An Apple at the Sea Side (Joan Morgan's Fruit Forum)

I can has some.

I’ve been obsessing about this for a while now. Today I finally received my Seagate 7200.3 320GB 7200 RPM 2.5″ SATA drive (ST9320421AS) for my MacBook, as well as a macally FireWire (PHRS250CC) case to house my old 80GB drive. It’s liberating to have more than 2GB of disk space free. I’m expecting slightly worse battery performance due to the faster drive speed, with the potential for some speed improvements for the same reason.

The install went off without a hitch. I booted from the Mac OS X 10.5 install disc and cloned the internal drive to the new drive (temporarily in the macally case) using Disk Utility. After maybe 90 minutes the process finished and I booted from FireWire to make sure everything was kosher. One quick drive swap between the macally and the MacBook and I’m in business.

Now to see how many weeks go by before another drive is filled.

(As a side note, Mac OS X decided the existing Spotlight index was bunk, and my fans have been spinning like mad while it’s rebuilt. I wish it wouldn’t do that on battery power.)

There's not too much there yet, but I'd link to just for the name alone:

Vaviblog

Basically a blog in the voice of Nikolai Vavilov (in case it wasn't obvious from the name.)

I wrote my first bookmarklet as a proof-of-concept the other day. I often find myself shortcutting up to the location bar to switch between development and production web servers. Here’s a bookmarklet that toggles “dev” and “www” subdomains for me, broken into a few lines for readability:

javascript:dL=document.location; nH=dL.host.split('.')[0]=='www'?'dev':'www'; dL.href=dL.href.replace(/^(https?:\/\/)[^\.]+/i,"$1"+nH);

And in its ready-to-drag-to-your-bookmark-bar version: switch.

Maybe it's because it's kind of stupid: The new University of Minnesota apple release is named 'SweeTango'.

An Apple Is Born (Epicurious)

Plus: We've entered a new age! YouTube trailers for fruit cultivars!
SweeTango - A Sneak Preview (YouTube)


(Much thanks to the anonymous commenter who noted this on the post below...I thought it deserved more exposure).

All I can say is I hope the apple is better than the name. It's got an encouraging pedigree at least—Honeycrisp x Zestar.

Not a ton of substance here, unfortunately, but I'm a sucker for any story with lots of old apple names:

Irish Peach has a crisp flavor (BBC)

I'm kind of bummed that 'Irish Peach' gets no mention outside of the title and a caption. C'mon...don't toy with us like that.

I think about England a lot when it comes to apples...somehow Ireland kind of gets forgotten.

...is there a limitless supply of these scraper sites? I crush one out and another pops up. This one appears to be mirroring it automatically.

So this one's for them:

You are reading The Fruit Blog:

thefruitblog.blogspot.com
or
www.thefruitblog.com

If you are reading this anywhere else (except on an RSS reader or through FoodCandy), then the site you are reading this on stole this content. Please do not patronize their advertisers, and please feel free to tell them how you feel about about stealing content (assuming you feel badly about it--if you're really into it and think its awesome, you don't need to say anything. Also, please go away.)

Okay, now I feel a little better.