Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Plums
Whereas different varieties of peaches and nectarines can be so similar in appearance that
even the farmer who raised them can't tell one type from another, there is no such diffi-
culty with plums. Unlike their conformist stone fruit cousins, which come in standard uni-
forms of gold and red, plums stand out by flaunting their individuality like so many fashion
models turned loose in a corporate headquarters. There are yellow plums, green plums, red
plums, scarlet plums, purple plums and even plums that are almost black. This abundance
has not escaped the notice of fruit marketers. Every summer grocery store produce man-
agers across the country go a little crazy for a couple of weeks in what has come to be called
in the trade "Plum-a-Rama" - piling up as many different colors of plums as they can find.
And, in fact, it has been shown that offering a variety of colors results in far more sales than
if the stores had just one.
Unfortunately, that variety is often scarcely more than skindeep. Bite into most com-
mercial plums today, and you'll find only slight variation on the theme of sweet and tart.
The surprise that comes with the unexpected flavor notes found in great plum varieties -
the wild herbaceousness of an Elephant Heart, the golden honeyed tang of a Wickson, the
almost unbearable sweetness of a greengage - is increasingly elusive. For the most part, the
market is dominated by large black plums that, in the carefully couched language of fruit
catalogs, "can be good when fully ripe." That may be changing, though.
Plums are wildly promiscuous fruits, cross-pollinating and sporting with abandon. Plant
breeders have taken advantage of this tendency by crossing varieties back and forth to try
to develop improved varieties. The plum assortment in your neighborhood grocery store is
likely to be a kind of living museum of the modern history of fruit breeding, with varieties
developed by the great Luther Burbank at the turn of the twentieth century piled right next
to varieties that were introduced only a couple years ago.
In his long career, Burbank developed more than eight hundred varieties of vegetables,
fruits and flowers, ranging from the baking potato and the freestone peach to the Shasta
daisy, but he was especially interested in plums, creating more than one hundred varieties.
Probably his greatest was the Santa Rosa, named after the Sonoma County town in which
he did most of his work.
