Orchard People

[00:00:00] Introduction and Apple Tasting Event
Susan: Hi everyone. There are so many different types of apples out there, including favorites like the Red Delicious apple, Granny Smith, and Pink Lady. But there are hundreds of other cultivars that you may not have heard of. This past weekend in the Ben Nobleman Park Community Orchard in Toronto, Canada, we had a really wonderful harvest festival. And as part of the event, we offered park visitors an apple tasting opportunity. You could come to our table and you could taste five different apple cultivars, so you could taste Macintosh Gala, Honeycrisp. Those are more well-known apples alongside lesser known cultivars like Ginger Gold and Silken.
After tasting, we asked visitors to vote for their favorite one. Now it was interesting, actually. Silken was the most popular apple of the day. It even beat out Honeycrisp, amazingly, and it was one of the cultivars that people had never even heard of. Now I love apple tastings because when you taste the apples side by side, it's really clear how different each one is in terms of taste and texture and appearance.
And it's the same with other fruit, like plums, for instance. They come in all different colors and each one tastes so different. So how does that happen? Sometimes a new fruit variety comes out as a result of nature, and sometimes it's a human or a plant breeder working with nature to develop a new planter tree.
[00:01:41] Luther Burbank: The Legendary Plant Breeder
Susan: Now, one of the most famous plant breeders in the world in the early 1900s was a man called Luther Burbank, and his story is absolutely fascinating. I learned all about him in Jane Smith's excellent book called The Garden of Invention, Luther Burbank, and the Business of Breeding Plants. I gotta tell you, I was so inspired by his story that I wanted to do a show all about him, where we could learn how Luther Burbank absolutely changed the world of gardening with some of his plant inventions.
[00:02:16] Interview with Rachel Spaeth
Susan: So my guest on the show today is Rachel Spaeth, the Garden Curator of the Burbank Home and Gardens in Santa Rosa, California. Rachel is also currently working on a PhD in historical plant breeding and genetics from UC Davis.
So, on the line is Rachel Spaeth. Rachel, thank you so much for coming on the show today.
Rachel: Good morning and thank you for having me.
Susan: Good morning. Okay, Rachel, can you take us back into time a little bit? Who was l Luther Burbank and what made him so special?
Rachel: Yeah.
[00:02:55] Luther Burbank's Famous Creations
Rachel: So Luther Burbank was the world's most famous plant breeder and horticulturalist of the turn of the 18th to 19th century. He was born in 1849 and died in 1926. Some of his most common inventions that people would be really familiar with would be the Burbank Russet potato, which was resistant to the blight that caused the Irish Potato Famine, and is still currently used as the staple potato for most french fries that you would eat.
The Santa Rosa plum and the Shasta daisy are probably his big three.
Susan: Yeah, amazing. So the Russet potato is the one when I go to my local little shop, I'm buying a Russet potato. That's Burbanks, right? Or is that a descendant of it?
Rachel: It's a more modern iteration of Burbank's, but the yellow rough skin on the outside with the white flesh on the inside, came from him.
Susan: And the Shasta daisy. So I have it in my own yard. There's one called Becky. Again, he developed that white daisy, which everybody always wanted. A beautiful white flower in their garden. Perfectly white. He developed that and then people took it and ran with it and made it even better. Is that correct?
Rachel: True. And it actually took him 17 years to breed that Shasta Daisy using four different parents from different corners of the world.
Susan: Wow. 17 years.
[00:04:23] The Magic of Plant Breeding
Susan: So what was the magic? What is it that he was doing when he was puttering in his garden? Did it have to do with, I don't know, running around with pollen and a little paintbrush or something?
Can you describe to us how he did his magic of developing new plants?
Rachel: Sure. So he would tap mature flowers off to get the pollen out into a little watch glass, and then use a horse hair brush to pollinate the female that he was interested in breeding. And then he would take, he didn't really keep good notes because he was not a classically trained scientist.
So what he would do is he would rip off strips of his clothing and tie it onto the parent. And then he would recall later that's what he used for breeding stock.
Susan: So this guy was basically relying a lot on his memory. So he's moving pollen around from tree to tree or from plant to plant. And he's remembering all of this stuff.
Did he have a garden? I dunno, 10 feet by 10 feet, or?
Rachel: Yeah, we're not really sure, but he seemed to recall things. If he couldn't necessarily recall them, he might just look at what the offspring looked like and then surmise what the parents could have been.
It's really easy to tell what the female is in your pollen cross because that's the one you're saving the seed from, but the male might not have been as obvious or memorable.
[00:05:49] Luther Burbank's Legacy and Influence
Susan: Okay, so there's Luther Burbank and he's developing stuff now in the world today. There's lots of people who are breeders. What made Luther so famous? Why do we still know about him today?
Rachel: So Luther Burbank was able to introduce over 800 different kinds of things and completely revolutionize the human perception for what a plum could be.
There was a lot of notoriety with being in newspapers then. Fame was not as easily attainable as it is now with our digital lifestyle. So if he could get his name in the paper, then it could be distributed widely. And during his days when we have Thomas Edison, and Henry Ford, and Goodyear, we're seeing the invention of the car.
The railroad has been built across the United States so you can move produce a lot faster from one side of the country to the other. The Panama Pacific link is made during his lifetime, so you can ship things down through South America and it's probably a really exciting time to be alive.
Susan: Now, he was good buddies with Edison? Thomas Edison. And who else were his big famous friends?
Rachel: Yeah, we've got a lot of those. So Paramahansa Yogananda came out to visit quite frequently. We've got pictures of him with Helen Keller. And in the gardens here we actually have a sensory garden that's dedicated to things you can touch and smell in her honor.
And his guest book is completely full of just super famous names from all over the world.
Susan: Yeah. What a god. Out of the book that I read about Luther Burbank's life and his business, Garden of Invention, is just how much he was admired by famous people, by the public. And I guess there was a transition, at that time, from a society that was more newcomers from Europe just making their way and planting their first cider orchards or whatever, to people who were a little more sophisticated and wanted fancy plants and maybe even had their own gardens that were not farms, but just for beautiful gardens. So it seems like he was at the helm of changing it and he had a real sense of what people might want.
Is that your sense of who he was?
Rachel: Definitely.
Susan: So let's talk about plums.
[00:08:27] The World of Plums Before and After Burbank
Susan: What was the world of plums like before Luther started to do his magic at breeding plums? What kind of plums were available to grow and to buy in North America at that time?
Rachel: Sure. So commercially there was practically no fresh eating plum market because it's really hard to transport them.
We've got trains, we've got boats, but we don't have cars or refrigeration. And so if people had plums, they would've been just home orchards, not a commercial scale. But there was a commercial scale industry for the French prunes. He worked a little bit with prunes. Anything that you could dry, you could ship.
And so that was a much more popular way for people to consume fruit, or also by making jams and jellies. So the ideal characteristics for a plum that you would breed would either be something you could dry or something you can can.
Susan: Okay, so then where was there room for development according to him?
How did he wanna make things better?
Rachel: Yeah, so from him not being classically trained as a scientist, he wasn't necessarily bounded by scientific principles that were considered foundational knowledge at the time, which meant he was willing to cross species, and see variety that you would get from the offspring that way. He imported scions and seeds from a person that he knew in Japan who he was also getting a lot of bulbs from.
And from those, he was able to make just a few selections that he could introduce, just straight away. In his day, it was a race for a nurseryman to name something and get it to market because there are no plant patents in his day. So there's no real protection or rights associated with that, and so it becomes who can distribute something first.
Susan: Okay, so he imported trees or seeds from these trees from Japan to America, and these trees actually would survive in the climate? It's must be a different climate. Wasn't it hit and miss and was this a new thing to do to bring in trees from majorly other countries and climates?
Rachel: Oh, definitely. Yeah, that's definitely a hit or miss sort of thing. But Luther noticed that, in all of these things that we referred to as plums, they all have very similar flower structure and general fruit shape. So he just assumed that you could mix the pollen and come up with a new result, and he was definitely not disappointed.
Susan: Wow. That is super lucky. So it just goes to show you gotta try stuff, right? You think, oh, it's never gonna work. Japan is so different. It's so far away. And he was like, nope, I'm gonna try this. I don't care. I'm gonna give it a go.
We've got an email from Charlie. Hello, Susan and Rachel listening from Thompson, Manitoba. What a very interesting topic. Do you know if there was ever a movie or at least a documentary produced about Luther Burbank? Thank you, Charlie.
Rachel: That's a really great question. We did a little podcast with the History Channel that was about 10 minutes long. And I know that there was a play one time about Luther.
We get some history clips now and then, and I think in the Michael Pollan, Botany of Desire, they talk about Luther when they talk about the potato. I don't know that there's really been a full feature on the life and times of Luther Burbank.
Susan: Charlie, if you're a filmmaker, I'm telling you this is a great story because, honestly, this man worked so hard to bring out new cultivars and new plants into the world, but he had no way of protecting his invention.
So he's working so hard, he's quite a genius, and that people can go out and steal and propagate his plants without him earning a penny. It's a really interesting story, so I think that's a good suggestion for any filmmakers that are listening.
Back to our plum discussion, he starts to develop some new cultivars. Are there any names for those cultivars that he developed, and what was special about them?
Rachel: Sure. So the interesting thing about what we refer to as a plum, it generally refers to something that's got a thin, smooth skin and a pit in the center and a flesh that you eat with usually the skin being able to peel away from the flesh.
But, the fruits that fit into that category range between either 17 to 40 species depending on which taxonomist you're asking. So the name "plum" is a little bit of a misnomer to begin with.
Susan: Very interesting. Okay.
Rachel: 'Cause there are so many things that people call plum, Luther would just collect all of those. And then you find a lot of, they call it genetic gain by cross-breeding to interspecifics, you get to see a lot of variation immediately in that generation that you plant the seed from. So a lot of those, he was able to just plant and market outright, like within the first year or two. So his top are probably Beauty, Wickson, Santa Rosa, the Burbank Plumcot.
Susan: So these are ones that he may have just introduced without developing too much.
Rachel: Yeah, not too much. So that would've been like first generation, like an F1 hybrid of something he brought from Japan, crossbred it with the European species, and then was able to introduce that in a very short period of time.
Susan: And we can get those today still at specialist fruit tree nurseries?
Rachel: You can get most of those. Since you guys are in Canada, it might be tricky for some people to get things to ship up there, but I know that Stark Brothers is carrying some of their stuff. And another great source is called Trees of Antiquity. They carry quite a few of the old Burbank varieties.
[00:14:38] The Pluot, Plumcot, and Modern Hybrids
Susan: Uhhuh. That's good to know. And yes, a lot of our listeners are in the states as well, so that's really useful. Let's talk about the Plumcot. Plumcot? I don't know if it's a plumcot or a pluot, but tell me about that. What is that?
Rachel: Okay. So a pluot is something that was bred by Floyd Zaiger and trademarked with the name pluot. He coined that term and patented it so that anything that came out of his production line could be called a pluot.
Luther Burbank called them plumcots when he was cross-breeding a plum in an apricot. A lot of people didn't believe that Luther was actually capable of doing this, and it wasn't until Floyd Zaiger was able to reproduce some of those crosses and then advanced the germplasm line, that people really stood back and said, okay, maybe Luther was right.
And then when we started sequencing the genomes of things, you can really see in Luther's plums or his plumcot introductions that there are plum and apricot genes in there.
Susan: So when you taste the fruit, is it like an apricot? Is it like a plum? What does it look like?
Rachel: There is a huge amount of variation that you can get from a plumcot, and it depends on how much of your genome sorts that was plum, and how much was apricot.
I don't know if I've really seen any furry skinned, plumcots or pluots. You might see them as apriums. So an aprium is three quarters apricot, one quarter plum. Wow. Where the mother was the apricot. And the plumcots and pluots, the mother was the plum and it was crossbred with an apricot.
Susan: We've got a comment here.
First a comment from Monique. Monique says, hi. Just wanted to say hi. Love the great information better than a library. I am in Whitehorse Yukon. Thank you so much, Monique. That's really nice. And I've got another one from Joyce and titled, thank You. Wow. I guess Rachel is the Indiana Jones of the plant world.
Her work is amazing. Thank you for all of it, from Queens, NYC. Thank you, Joyce. Okay. And then here we've got from Daniel. Daniel says I'm growing Apex plumcot that I sourced from the CRFG Scion Exchange in San Jose, California. It's good, but not exceptional.
I prefer firmer flesh. It's definitely not as sweet as some of the modern hybrids. Oh, that's interesting.
Rachel: Yeah. there's a couple of alternatives that you could go with that. Shiro is a really good plum that would do well in that area. And then also El Dorado, both of which are usually available through those.
CRFG stands for California Rare Fruit Growers.
And we have chapters all over the country, even though it started in California. And every year in the wintertime, we do a big scion exchange, which is like a huge stick swapping party, and we just have these really long tables with all kinds of unpatented material that people can take home and then graft onto their existing tree, or will custom graft stuff for people too.
And throughout Northern California, especially, a lot of the Burbank cultivars are available. In the past five years, I've been able to collect almost 60 of his 200 plum introductions.
Susan: Wow. So these are 60 that still exist. You can find them, but of the rest of the 200. Have some of them disappeared over the many years that have passed since we lost him?
Rachel: Oh, absolutely. All it takes is a fruit to not really be that favorable and not being grown, and then it can become extinct fairly quickly. And a lot of his creations are like that. For example, he did a lot of work with breeding dahlias. And a dahlia tuber just simply isn't that long lived.
So when we show people our dahlias here, we show them modern iterations of things that were based on Luther Burbank's work.
Susan: And that's another interesting thing, I think, for people listening. Many of the people listening know that you plant an apple seed, for instance, and wait for it to become a tree.
And that the apples on that tree will be nothing like the original apple that you ate and you spat out the seeds. And that once people, like Luther Burbank, they invent something through pollination and all the work in fiddling that he does in order to propagate that tree, in particular, if it's a fruit tree, they need to graft it.
[00:19:24] Grafting and Propagation Techniques
Susan: Taking what you call, those sticks of, just branches from the tree that you wanna propagate, the perfect pluot tree, and then putting it onto rootstock, fusing those together and then you can propagate that tree. It's basically cloning the tree. Am I correct in saying that?
Rachel: Yes, absolutely, and Luther was really into grafting because it speeds up the amount of time necessary to get a fruit set. If you were to start that seed, it might be five to seven years before you can evaluate that fruit. But if you start that seed and then graft it onto a mature tree, the mature tree takes over the internal hormones, I would say. So it moves those hormones into that young stick, and then you can get fruiting within two years instead of seven.
Susan: So Rachel, Joyce had mentioned that you're like the Indiana Jones of the plant world.
Let's face it, and you can be humble, but you do a bit of that. So tell us about the multi apple tree that you have fun with, with the different apple cultivars.
[00:20:31] The Multi-Grafted Apple Tree
Rachel: The funny thing about the Indiana Jones of the plant world, there's an Atlas Obscura piece that's about my plum research, and that's what she's referring to when she says that.
So the multi grafted apple tree that I have has over 50 cultivars of apples that are grafted onto one small tree. The tree is only about seven years old and just about every single branch on the tree has a unique kind of fruit.
Susan: That's incredible. And so I have a picture and, if people go to Orchard People's Facebook page, I put that picture of your tree on it. And in front of it is a box with the different apples in the beautiful different colors of each apple.
It's such a great picture.
Rachel: Oh, thank you. Unfortunately, that tree is right next to the restrooms and people see the fruit on it and just assume that a red apple on a tree is ready to eat. And so most of those apples on the other side had half a bite taken out of them.
[00:21:29] The Apple Dilemma
Susan: Oh no. Oh no. That is heartbreaking.
I grow my fruit trees in a community park and we do get to harvest our cherries and our apricots and our plums, but before the apples ripen, park visitors just take them and eat them, and oops, they're not ripe.
They throw them away. Heartbreaking, isn't it? Quite heartbreaking.
[00:21:46] Luther Burbank's Quince
Rachel: Yeah. The one that really gets us though is his quince. So Luther Burbank also introduced like seven different kinds of quince. Quince isn't really a popular fruit anymore 'cause it's just this like big, hard, it smells good, it looks like an apple, but you have to cook it with an equal portion of sugar to make it delicious.
In Luther's day though, it was a natural source of pectin. So anybody that would be canning jams and jellies would have a quince, so that they could use it to solidify their jams and jellies.
Susan: So that, so you're saying quince was another one that he played around with and developed and improved.
Rachel: Yeah, and it's another one that we get bite marks.
Susan: That you get bite marks in. I'm so sorry. Oh my gosh, that is so sad. We've got an email from Dawn. Hello, really enjoying the show from Selma, Alabama. Very interesting. Thanks. Thank you, Dawn.
[00:22:40] Innovative Berries by Burbank
Susan: I wanna talk about the berries that he invented.
So Rachel, let's talk a little bit about the types of berries that Luther Burbank introduced. What did he bring out that was new in terms of berries?
Rachel: The three big berries that Luther brought out that were new would be the Thornless blackberry, which is amazing for harvesting or pruning. the White blackberry, which was bred for ladies having tea so they wouldn't stain their white gloves when eating blackberry tarts.
He did an interspecific hybrid between a blackberry and a raspberry called the Phenomenal berry. And then the most widely successful, though also invasive and delicious, would be the Himalayan blackberry.
Susan: So that was an interesting thing about getting your white gloves dirty.
It's not a problem I've had before. I don't know, have you had a problem with blackberries in your white gloves?
Rachel: I don't tend to wear white gloves.
Susan: I know that was an interesting one. Why do you need a white blackberry? Does it still exist? I wonder if it tasted good.
Rachel: It's quite delicious. It's almost disappointing how much it just tastes like a blackberry.
I would say that it has a more citrusy note to it. And the one that we had here was infected with the raspberry bushy dwarf virus. So we weren't going to propagate it for sale here, but we worked with a whole bunch of different research institutions. And finally, after about six years, we were able to get it introduced through AgriStarts in Florida, who did two years of heat treatment and tissue culture on this to be able to make it virus free so that we can, once again, distribute the Snowbank white blackberry.
Susan: Oh, wonderful. Snowbank. Okay, so it is available now already, the white blackberry?
Rachel: Yeah. if people wanna order it so that they can have it shipped to their house, they probably have to go through Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds, or if they are in a commercial industry, they can probably order from AgriStarts directly.
We only distribute them locally.
Susan: That's exciting. we've got a comment from Chelsea.
[00:25:03] The Himalayan Blackberry Invasion
Susan: Chelsea says, Himalayan Blackberry was supposedly created by Burbank in hopes of being a vigorous food crop. But it's now naturalized throughout the Pacific Northwest. It's incredibly resilient and hard to remove.
They're amazing berries. Some of the best, she says. They're considered invasive and they're also considered delightful. I refuse to vilify plants, but this is an example of Burbank's work that is now owned by the world. Impossible to commodify. It will likely never leave the region. That's interesting. So essentially, when you're a plant wizard and you're creating new plants, you don't know what the effect is.
So what Chelsea is saying is, it became invasive. Even though she likes it, it's taking over from native plants. What's your comment on that, Rachel?
Rachel: Absolutely. It has displaced some natives. Like we had a California native blackberry that used to line our waterways, but the Himalaya has now taken that over, and it's a problem that goes from here all the way up through, I think even into Washington, and maybe on the other side into Canada too.
But even though Luther Burbank created and introduced this, it really was the birds who distributed it. So it's become widely successful and naturalized because it became part of the system. And it is difficult with that particular berry because it is a food stability item. Anybody, I recommend waist higher because people walk their dogs along the creeks, right, but they're delicious berries and they're free for the taking. So it does create a food security for less franchise people or people that are just willing to pick sharp berries.
If it is in your yard though, it's extremely difficult to get rid of.
Susan: I've heard people talk about bramble invading their orchard or whatever their garden. Is
that bramble?
Rachel: Yeah, you could consider them bramble canes. So what makes it a bramble cane is that it can bend down and root itself like an air layer really easily. Basically, anytime that main stem bends down towards the ground, if it's touching soil, it'll root.
Susan: So you're blaming the birds, but the bramble or these blackberries are also doing it themselves, spreading inch by inch around nature.
Rachel: Absolutely. Yeah, and then it also has become habitat here in California, for an endangered freshwater shrimp that we have. And so in some areas where they have located the shrimp, you are not allowed to dig it out because it is habitat for that endangered species.
Susan: Interesting. We have an email here from Gale and thank you Gale, for sending this in.
Gale says, hi just tuned in, so don't know if you've already covered this. Does Rachel have a website or Facebook page that I can go to? Thank you. Gale is from Regina, Saskatchewan. So do you wanna tell us about what webpage can people go to for more information?
Rachel: Sure.
[00:28:14] Luther Burbank Home and Garden
Rachel: You can go to www.lutherburbank.org and our Facebook page is Luther Burbank Home and Garden. The site that I work at is 1.6 acres and it is where Luther lived for a considerable amount of time. His original greenhouse is here that was built in 1889, and you'll see that lovely picture on the Orchard People website that I got of a rainbow.
I really wanted to get it going into the chimney, but I would've been in the pond. I had to get it off to the side there. The Home and Gardens is set up to have a museum where people can go inside and learn about Luther Burbank with docent-led tours. And then we also have 26 raised demonstration beds that all contain plants that Luther either worked with directly or are modern iteration because of his genetics work.
And then the themed areas just have to have a theme, like a rose garden or a cut flowers garden or something like that. And if you are planning a visit to come out and see us here in Santa Rosa, you can go onto our What's Blooming in the Garden section and look at what you might expect to see in flower during whatever particular time of year.
Susan: Yeah, it sounds great. And since I became interested in Luther Burbank, I'm totally gonna come visit you one day. I really look forward to it. And I just wanna learn more. I love history and so does Ralph. It looks like Ralph sent us an email entitled, hi. Ralph says, hi Susan. This is an amazing topic today, especially for history buffs. Love the show, thanks, from Atlantic City, New Jersey.
Yeah, I love history. So there you go. We've also got one from Larry. So many famous people were intrigued by this man, yet many folks have never heard of him or what he has done. Thank you for bringing all of this to light. I'm tuned in from Atlanta, Georgia. Thank you. Larry.
And yeah, such an exciting topic. So interesting and so much to learn. So let me maybe squeeze in one more question for you.
[00:30:19] Growing Heritage Fruits
Susan: And this one is from John from London, Ontario.
John from London, Ontario says, I've been growing heritage apple and pear cultivars on our farm near Peterborough, Ontario, but have never tackled plums or peaches.
I'm wondering if one of the two is easier than the other to grow. If so, what cultivars of either plums or peaches might Rachel recommend for Central Ontario? Rachel, I know you're not from Ontario, but I don't know if you have any ideas of interesting heritage, easy to grow plums or peaches?
Rachel: Sure. I'm actually from Pennsylvania, so I understand shoveling your weather in the wintertime. I just don't like to do it anymore.
And Luther Burbank was from Massachusetts, so we do get a little bit of that. One time he was back in Boston giving a lecture, and somebody asked him if you could raise anything in Boston, what would it be? And he said, enough money to get back to California. But I do know that there are a couple of peach cultivars that work really well in hardiness zones.
Like you're probably like four or five up there maybe. One of them is called Reliance, and it is a free stone yellow peach. That's fantastic for canning. And the other one is a newer cultivar that's called Contender. My mother grows both of those in Pennsylvania and she gets a really nice fruit set every year.
The cool thing about peaches is that they are self fertile, so you don't need to have an additional cultivar to get a good fruit set.
Susan: I think that sounds like great advice.
Rachel: With plums, most of them are outcross, so you really do need another source of pollen to get a good fruit set. Here, a lot of the Japanese plums will work. We can grow pretty much anything.
Luther said it was the chosen spot of all the earth to grow plants, but I know that some of the damson plums and some of the gage plums, which are both European. Those would probably work but wouldn't be as reliable of producers.
Susan: Sounds like good advice.
We already have a few more emails here. Rachel, we've got an email from Jake. Jake says, no questions today. Just very curious regarding your topic. I live in Knoxville, Tennessee. Thank you. Jake. I was in your hometown recently for an arborist conference. It's a really pretty town. Thank you for writing us.
Rachel, let's go back to Burbank and his inventions. When did you first learn about him and did he inspire you early on in your journey?
Rachel: I didn't learn about Luther Burbank until I moved to Santa Rosa. I came to California seeking cheaper education and better weather, and I got both.
And I used to live in the neighborhood of the home and gardens and work on the other side. And I would walk through the Serene Garden, and I got started here as a volunteer while I finished degrees in horticulture and botany and evolutionary biology and all that stuff.
So I didn't really hear about him until I came here. And then he is just such a fascinating character with so many rabbit holes. I'm always learning new things. I'm always finding new things, and there are always surprises that pop up in the gardens that I haven't seen. And I've been here for 11 years.
Susan: Wow. When did you start growing fruit trees and get your interest in fruit trees then?
Rachel: I'm from a very rural community in Pennsylvania. My hometown is only nine tenths of a mile wide, and I was raised eight miles outside of that town, and we grew a lot of our own fruits and vegetables and did a lot of canning and preserving.
So the Macintosh apple tastes like my childhood.
Susan: By the way, it's interesting that you say that, because early on in the show I talked about an apple tasting, and of course, you know that the Macintosh apple came from my home province, Ontario. John Macintosh was the one who discovered that apple.
And yet out of five cultivars, I hate to tell you my dear, but Macintosh was way down at the bottom. I don't know how that happened.
Rachel: Yeah, I think it's just because the flavor is so familiar that's like the chicken soup of the apple world now. There's so many other amazing, incredible flavors and textures.
And the taste palette has really changed since that was first introduced even here. Whenever we're tasting the blackberries, we have Lawton, which was one of the original parents for the Snowbank. And when you taste that, it's not a huge berry and it has a slight bitter aftertaste to it, it was no longer favorable.
People just want sweet, instead of slightly bitter.
Susan: Interesting. Yeah. So we've got an email here from Tony from Arizona. My peach harvest was challenging. Timing of harvest. Question mark. Fruit, still greenish, wait longer. Fruit spoils too quickly. No shelf life. I think Tony from Arizona is asking for some advice from you.
[00:35:26] Grafting Techniques and Tips
Rachel: It sounds like you need to regraft a new cultivar, but there are a couple of funny things about that. When you see a peach in the store and it's got that beautiful pink blush, a lot of times it's just because the pink side was towards the sun and the pink side seems to be like with the market preference is so a lot of people are trying to breed peaches that'll end up with that pink blush to them.
A lot of times you need to pick 'em before the bears or the birds will get 'em, or here, the people. And so you are picking something that's a little bit more insipid. But I would say if you're not really happy with it, just graft something on it that you might like better.
Susan: Yeah, and I like that because what you're saying is don't dig out and throw away an established tree.
Whatever age the tree is, if you get some basic grafting skills, you can play with it, right? If it's young, you can do it. If it's older, is that true, Rachel?
Rachel: Oh, absolutely. You can graft a tree at any age.
Susan: And so she doesn't have to throw away all the old branches of the tree either. Keep some branches, do what you do with your apple tree, graft on a branch here and there, and see what happens.
Rachel: And the really cool thing about peach and things in that Prunus, in general, is they're mostly compatible. So she can take that peach tree and she could graft almonds and peaches and plums and apricots all onto that tree and have an entire fruit salad tree that she gets a huge harvest out of that encompasses, from the beginning of, or the middle of June when your fruiting season starts and goes all the way through September. So it becomes a really functional home tree if you have a large established tree that you can change like that.
Susan: Now, that is such a fun idea, but I want you to clarify something, because early on in this show, you said that when Luther Burbank developed his plums, he was using a bunch of different species that everybody called plums, but they were different things.
And so let's clarify here, because if I have an apple tree, can I graft on a branch for cherries and for apricots?
Rachel: No. So that, so you have to look at the fruit structure a little bit. An apple is called a pome, and a pome is a fruit that you cut in half and it has five little seeds in there. And essentially with an apple you're eating an expanded hypanthium, is the technical term for the floral cup that you're eating in an apple.
But with a plum, you're eating what's called the mesocarp, which is a swollen tissue that protects the ovary, essentially. And those are called stone fruits or drupe.
So you need to stick with stone fruits on stone fruits and seed fruits on seed fruits. Apple can be a little bit tricky. Actually it's really forgiving if you're just putting apples on apples. But if you wanna put other things onto an apple that are apple-like, say pears, there are some issues with that.
So the first issue with that is that pears produce a compound in their conducting tissue that apples are not strong enough to tolerate. So if you put a pear scion onto your apple, those compounds will move down through your conducting tissue and eventually the pear will just die off.
The other problem with it is that pear is like the early bird, like super chipper, ready to roll at dawn and ready to meet their day. And apple is like the person that likes to wake up at 9:30 and they need coffee to really function, right? So pear wakes up in the beginning of spring and it's like I'm ready to go. And apple says, not yet. I'm still tired.
And so the pear starves whenever you're trying to graft the pear onto the apple.
Susan: Wow. Who would've thought that pears and apples just don't have enough in common really to get along.
Rachel: No, but you can put them both onto quince, which is really interesting. Or even hawthorn, which are even further distantly related.
Susan: So I have one last question for you.
[00:39:43] Genetic Modification vs. Traditional Breeding
Susan: We're coming up to the end of the show, but we're talking about inventing new cultivars and we haven't mentioned at all genetically modified cultivars.
How is that different from everything we've been talking about today and from what Luther Burbank did for all those years?
Rachel: Gotcha. Okay. So what Luther would do, is he would take one color palette and another color palette and smash 'em together, and then you would have this new combination of colors that you could have at the end.
What genetic modification does is it adds more paint onto the palette.
Just like squeezing a color from somewhere else.
Susan: Interesting way.
Rachel: He didn't have that technology available to him during that day, and it's really difficult for us to impart our 21st century mindset on somebody who lived without refrigeration or electricity for most of their lives, to see whether he would be pro or con.
If I had to venture, I guess, I think that he would've played with every kind of variation he could possibly find. So I don't know. And there are some advantages to using CRISPR technology, for instance. So with that white blackberry that was infected with the virus, you could take CRISPR and cut out that chunk of virus without even adding anything else to the genome, and then you would have a virus free plant, and that would take six months instead of the two years that it took us to do heat treatment and tissue culture. Yeah.
Susan: Very interesting. Thank you so much for opening our minds to this whole story teaching us about Luther Burbank and what he did.
Rachel: Thank you.
Susan: And thank you so much again for coming on the show today, Rachel. It was a lot of fun and I can't wait to meet you in person one day when I go to the, gardens there.
Rachel: Oh yes. I'll give you the curator's tour.
Susan: That sounds fantastic. Okay. You take care and enjoy your day.
Rachel: Thank you, too.
Susan: Bye-bye.
Rachel: Bye.
[00:41:50] Conclusion and Farewell
Susan: So that was Rachel Spaeth, the Garden Curator of the Luther Burbank Home and Gardens in Santa Rosa, California. And that is it for today's episode of the Urban Forestry Radio Show. I do hope you enjoyed the show.
Thank you so much for tuning in. It's been wonderful to have you as a listener, and I hope to see you again next time.