[Sca-cooks] NYTimes.com Article: Peaches Coaxed From the Desert Sand

[Huette von Ahrens]

Here is a food related article from today's NY
Times.

Huette

> Peaches Coaxed From the Desert Sand
>
> April 16, 2003
> By DAVID KARP
>
> OASIS, Calif.
> LAST summer as I was visiting a date farm in
> this scruffy
> Coachella Desert community three hours
> southeast of Los
> Angeles, my jaw dropped at an incongruous
> vision across the
> road: an orchard of young peach trees braving
> the
> 120-degree heat, looking as out of place as a
> grapefruit
> grove in New York.
>
> I returned last week to observe the peach
> harvest, the very
> first of the season in the United States.
> Defying a long
> history of failed attempts to market
> ultra-early desert
> peaches, Sun World International, a large fruit
> and
> vegetable grower, claimed to have two new
> breakthrough
> varieties offering larger, tastier fruit than
> before. I
> wanted to know, were they really worth eating?
>
> April is problematic for peach lovers. The last
> contra-seasonal Chilean fruits are mealy and
> brown inside
> from long storage, but California's main
> harvest, in the
> San Joaquin Valley, does not begin until the
> end of the
> month. There is virtually no fresh supply, so
> prices are
> high. Sun World's managers hope to earn big
> returns in this
> gap between seasons, but the difficulties are
> commensurately daunting.
>
> Most varieties of peach trees are adapted to
> temperate
> climates with marked winters. They need a fixed
> number of
> "chilling hours" below 45 degrees before they
> are ready to
> emerge from dormancy, so they don't get caught
> by a
> midwinter warm spell. In areas with mild
> winters like the
> Coachella Desert, they struggle to emerge from
> dormancy in
> spring, and fruit erratically. Pomologists have
> long sought
> varieties that would thrive despite warm
> winters, bringing
> in and crossing exotic types like Hawaii,
> Okinawa and
> peento, all ultimately derived from the peach's
> homeland in
> southern China.
>
> The day before visiting Sun World's commercial
> orchard, I
> met Terry Bacon, the company's breeder of new
> peach, plum
> and apricot varieties, at his research planting
> in Mecca,
> eight miles northeast of Oasis. The
> late-afternoon sun
> glinted off the Salton Sea and turned the
> Chocolate
> Mountains ocher as we toured the property,
> seven acres
> surrounded by table grape vineyards and citrus
> groves.
>
> Mr. Bacon explained that previous
> early-maturing "low
> chill" varieties had serious flaws for both
> producer and
> consumer. They typically were small or greenish
> (deadly
> offenses on the modern market), had soft
> beaklike tips that
> bruised easily or had mediocre flavor. Peaches
> taste best
> when they mature slowly, he said, but for
> desert fruits the
> short period between bloom in late January and
> harvest in
> April does not give much time to develop
> sweetness and
> aroma.
>
> To come up with improved varieties, Mr. Bacon
> and his
> predecessors at Sun World's breeding program
> made tens of
> thousands of crosses over 15 years. No
> artificial genetic
> modifications were involved, but because early
> peaches
> ripen before their seeds are mature, the
> breeders employed
> a technique called "embryo rescue," pampering
> the tiny
> seeds in test tubes and adding nutrients until
> they grew
> large enough to germinate and be planted.
>
> "They're like preemies," said Mr. Bacon, as he
> walked down
> a row of shoulder-high three-year-old seedlings
> that he was
> evaluating, tapping data into his laptop
> computer.
>
> "I select trees that bloom hard, fast and
> early," he said.
> For fruits, "the overriding criteria are
> production, size,
> firmness and color - the big four - and then,
> of course,
> flavor," he added, laughing.
>
> Sun World patented two varieties with the
> ungainly names of
> Supechthirteen and Supechfifteen, and planted
> 21 acres in
> Oasis, of which seven are four years old and
> bearing their
> first substantial crop this year. Other than a
> single
> one-acre plot, it is the only commercial peach
> planting in
> the hot low deserts of California.
>
> The next morning I visited the Oasis orchard,
> where the
> trees, light green with a new flush of growth,
> looked lush
> and healthy. Just after dawn, workers started
> harvesting,
> and I noted with amusement that the crew packed
> the fruits
> right in the orchard, on a stand usually used
> for peppers,
> as the nearest commercial peach packing house
> was hundreds
> of miles away.
>
> Only Supechthirteen was ripe. I didn't expect
> much, since
> the variety was selected chiefly for extreme
> earliness -
> the harvest started April 4. But the first
> fruit I sampled,
> a specimen so ripe that a bird had already
> pecked it,
> tasted pretty good, with ample juice and decent
> peachy
> flavor. Others examples, however, ranged down
> the scale to
> tart and watery. The harvest of Supechfifteen,
> supposed to
> be larger and tastier, and the main focus of
> Sun World's
> efforts, was still a few days off.
>
> At the company's Coachella office, nearby,
> David Marguleas,
> a senior vice president, explained that both
> desert Supech
> varieties that I saw, and four others from the
> San Joaquin
> Valley, 200 miles north, would be sold under
> the brand name
> Amber Crest from early April to early June.
> Increasingly,
> he said, marketers of peaches, nectarines and
> plums strive
> to offer large buyers a continuous supply by
> gathering
> similar varieties under a single label.
>
> After I returned home to Los Angeles, I called
> around the
> country to find out who else might be shipping
> April
> peaches. I was amazed to discover how many
> growers in the
> United States had tried, and how few had
> succeeded. From
> the 1960's to the early 1990's, it turned out,
> there were
> several hundred acres each in the California
> desert
> (including some grown by Sun World),
> southwestern Arizona
> and the southern Rio Grande Valley in Texas.
> For different
> reasons - farmers inexperienced in peach
> cultivation,
> adverse weather, inferior varieties, poor
> handling - every
> one of the commercial growers pulled up their
> trees. The
> exceptions are in Florida, where the harvest
> from several
> hundred acres, starting about April 10, is
> consumed within
> the state. In addition, northwestern Mexico
> exports small
> quantities of peaches to the United States,
> starting next
> week.
>
> Last Saturday a Sun World employee dropped off
> at my Los
> Angeles bungalow a bag of Supechfifteen
> peaches. They were
> larger, denser and richer in flavor than the
> earlier
> variety - a definite step up. I'll be
> interested to see if
> Sun World can pick them ripe enough to taste
> this good and
> still arrive at distant markets in salable
> condition. So
> far most of the desert peaches have gone to
> wholesale
> terminals in California, but the company's
> salesmen say
> that they intend to ship to the East Coast.
> Meanwhile,
> Melissa's World Variety Produce is offering the
> fruit by
> mail (three and a half pounds for $28.95 to
> $31.95,
> including second-day air delivery;
> 800-588-0151).
>
> April peaches may well continue to improve as
> breeders make
> further progress, though they will never match
> the best
> summer varieties. Perhaps it is perverse to
> force peaches
> to grow at a place and time for which they are
> not
> naturally suited, but for centuries farmers
> have honorably
> raised out-of-season crops for luxury markets,
> and the
> Coachella Desert might arguably be considered a
> giant
> natural hothouse.
>


=====
Blessed are they who can laugh at themselves for they
shall never cease to be amused.

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