| It’s fall and baked goods with warming spices really satisfy. I also have a soft spot for apples having worked for a couple of years in the Fruit Research Project at the Horticultural Research Center in Excelsior. Some of you may have visited the apple barn there to buy some apples—sometimes you get to sample apples there before they are released varieties.
My job there was “research plot technician” which meant I worked for the senior scientist for the project, David Bedford. David is still there and the evidence of his long work (and the scientists before him) is in all the named apple varieties: Honeycrisp, Zestar!, SnowSweet, SweeTango, First Kiss. |
| Apple breeding is not a fast process. When I started with the project in the 1980s, Honeycrisp was already selected but I don’t think it had a name yet, just a selection number. Part of my job in the late summer and fall was to walk the orchards with David and sample apples. I remember getting quite nauseous the first week until David told me it was okay to spit out the sample bites. How did I miss him doing that?
The selection orchards were the result of pollination strategies David devised to combine the best traits from different parents. Few apples would be selected each year but, in the early spring, we would collect budwood from a handful of possible contenders and then splice a single bud onto an already growing whip of rootstock. Later, if successful, those graftlings would be transplanted into an evaluation orchard.
I suspect that the original orchards I walked with David have been long been exhausted of possible selections, plowed under, and new orchards have taken their place. When I’m finally released from my “immunity bubble” I’d love to get down to the Research Center and see how things are going now.
P.S. I saw a TV segment with David a few days ago. The assumed parentage of Honeycrisp has been overturned based on plumbing its DNA. Talk about rocking my world! |
