Category: Fruits and nuts

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What I did on my holidays: The Pluot

“Can I have one of these plums,” I asked the friend with whom we were staying in California.

“They’re not plums, they’re pluots. Some kind of cross between a plum and an apricot.”

Skeptical as ever, I rushed off to check such an outlandish claim, and, chastened, realized that there’s a lot I do not know about fruit. Not only is the pluot genuine, there are apriums and plumcots too. The one I tried was apparently called Dino Egg, a trademarked (and exceedingly fanciful — I mean, who knows?) name for a variety registered as Dapple Dandy.

Pluots are simply stunning. They are sweeter than most plums I’ve ever bought, and not in the least bit stringy. The flesh is not just sweet though; it has complex smells and tastes, slightly spicy, maybe, with — there’s no other way to put it — the taste of sunshine. And the flesh parts easily from the stone, at least the one I had did, which may be related to the lack of stringiness.

Fast forward a week and we’re barreling along I-5 from Los Angeles to San Francisco, through the heart of the San Joaquin Valley. I’ve seen intensive industrial agriculture before, but this was still an eye-opener. ((The sheer logistics of it boggles the mind; we passed 14 double trailers full of ripe tomatoes and three of garlic — about right for a tomato sauce. I need to find a way in to that story.)) We pulled over to visit the store at Murray Family Farms, and found more kinds of pluot than you could shake a stick at. Time was pressing, so we couldn’t chat long to the two really friendly guys in the store, but we did buy a couple of bags of pluots to take Back East, where we’d never seen them.

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They went down pretty well, with about as much skepticism about their origins as I had originally. That’s one of them, grown by a Nature’s Partner (and bought at a supermarket, not Murray Family Farms). The number ought to tell me which particular partner was responsible for that particular pluot, but although the Nature’s Partner web site does everything except squirt cider in your ear it doesn’t easily let you peer behind the number.

The day before my return to Rome, I noted in the local paper that the following day’s edition would contain an article entitled The hunt for the elusive pluot. Coincidence? I think not. In the end it turned out to be a review of a book about the hunt for the elusive pluot. Of course I haven’t read it yet, but judging from another review it might well be a tasty read.

Meanwhile, someone tell me whether pluots have spread beyond California? I stalk the supermarkets of the US as often as I can, but I’ve never seen it.

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Nibbles: Cacao, Soil mapping, Rice terraces, Maize, Cereus

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Nibbles: Urban bees, Borlaug, Cotton, Income, Mammals, Human disease, Caribou, Chestnut, IRRI

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    Nibbles: Drought resistant rice, Bees, Bison, Coffee in Kenya, Cassava in Africa, Pigeon pea, Chickens in Uganda, Green ranching in the Amazon, Climate change, Dates, Museums and DNA, Organic, Ecology meet

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    Old maps used to track down hops in Sweden

    ResearchBlogging.orgI’ve done a fair amount of reading and thinking about the theory and practice of germplasm collecting in my time, but I don’t think I’ve ever come across an example similar to the one described in a recent paper in Genetic Resources and Crop Evolution. ((Strese, E., Karsvall, O., & Tollin, C. (2009). Inventory methods for finding historically cultivated hop (Humulus lupulus L.) in Sweden. Genetic Resources and Crop Evolution. DOI: 10.1007/s10722-009-9464-9.))

    In it, Swedish researchers describe how they took advantage of a couple of interesting quirks in the history of Sweden to devise what I think is a pretty novel strategy for sampling agrobiodiversity. They were interested in collecting germplasm of hops (Humulus lupulus) for a new genebank that’s under development. Now, the thing is that, although this crop is no longer grown in Sweden now, for 400 years from 1442 doing so was compulsory, in order to guarantee sufficient domestic production for beer-making. Very sensible, too.

    Initially, all peasants were required to grow at least 40 hop poles. By 1483, the quantity was increased to 200 hop poles. The law was not formally repealed until 1860. As a result of this law, the plant has left several financial, fiscal and legal imprints on Swedish history.

    The second historical curiosity about Sweden is that it boasts a unique set of some 12,000 large-scale maps dating back to the mid-17th century. Because of the hops law, hop gardens are actually marked on these maps in some detail (click to enlarge).

    hops

    So the collectors used what they call a “history to plant” method to identify likely areas for collecting, using not only maps such as the one reproduced above, but also…

    …medieval charters from the fifteenth century files of land belonging to the abbey of Vadstena, documents from the expeditions of Carl von Linné and his pupils from the eighteenth century and also documents from the breeding program in Svalöf from the beginning of the twentieth century.

    And a pretty successful strategy it was too.

    We found no hop plants at locations which were not indicated in the maps as hop gardens. Today living plants were possible to find in more then 33% of the total inventoried sites, indicated as hop gardens on large-scale maps.

    As I say, I can’t think of another example of the use of historical maps to locate specific crops for sampling. No doubt the specific circumstances that made this possible in Sweden are not all that common around the world. Anyway, if you know of similar work, let me know. Always interested in keeping up to date with the latest in germplasm collecting.