White Delight Peach Series - PowerPoint Presentation

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White Delight Peach SeriesDavid Byrne and Natalie AndersonDepartment of Horticultural Sciences, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843-2133, USA

Dr. David H. Byrne

d-byrne@tamu.edu

Natalie Anderson

n-

anderson @tamu.edu

ABSTRACTIn the late 1990s, the Prunus Breeding and Genetics Program began to develop a series of low acid white fleshed peach cultivars adapted to the medium chill zone of the southern USA. This work has resulted in 4 new peach cultivars that ripen consecutively from late May to mid July in the medium chill zone of Texas. This is the first series of low acid white-fleshed peaches released for the medium chill zone of the USA. All of these varieties bloom within several days of ‘June Gold’, and have similar sizes and skin blush color but better fruit shape and firmness as compared to ‘June Gold’ (Table 1). These cultivars resulted in crosses done between adapted breeding materials with low acid white peaches/nectarines from California, Japan, and China.

CultivarFull bloomRipe dateWeight (g)Firm-nessRegal13 Marab21 Mayd105d7.0bWD105 Mare25 Maycd138ad6.8bJune Gold 09 Marbe01 Junc130ad6.0cScarlet Pearl16 Mara16 Junb165a7.3abWD206 Mare13 Junb141ad7.8aWD312 Marac29 Juna148ac7.1abWD411 Marad10 Jula144ac7.7a

Table 1. Bloom time, ripe date, fruit size and firmness of White Delight (WD) peaches in Fairfield, Texas (2006-2011).

Parentage of White Delight Peaches

Adaptation of White Delight Peaches

White Delight 1 - Late May

White Delight 2 - Mid June

White Delight 3 - Late June

White Delight 4 - Early July

Full bloom = 60-80% flowers open, Ripe date = date when 20% of the fruit is firm ripe. Rating scale 0 – 9; 0-4 = unacceptable, 5 = marginal, 6 = good, 7 = very good, 8-9 = excellent for commercial use. Mean separation within columns by Duncan’s Multiple Range test at the 5% level. Items with the same letter are not significantly different. No letters within a column indicates no significant differences.

WD1=White Delight One, WD2=White Delight Two, WD3=White Delight Three, WD4=White Delight Four

The White Delight peach series bloom

within

a few days of

‘June Gold’

in the medium chill

zone (Table 1). Based

on the relative bloom times of standard

cultivars,

WD1 and WD2

need

about 550 chilling units (CU) whereas WD3 and WD4 need about 700 chilling units for proper flowering and fruiting. All four have produced consistently in zones 2 (450-550 CU), 3 and 4 (550-750 CU) of Texas. Of these, only WD2 was tested in zone 5 (350-450 CU) where although it had a more prominent suture, it consistently ripened large crops of high quality low acid white fleshed peaches (Fig 1).

All the crosses were

between low to medium chill, acid, yellow fleshed peach selections from the TAMU program with high quality low acid, white fleshed genotypes from Japan (‘Chiyohime’), California (‘Summersweet’) and China (‘Zaohongzhu’). These new cultivars were developed using germplasm from multiple programs both in the USA and abroad (see pedigree diagrams).

Ripening and Quality of the White Delight Peaches

This series consist of 4 cultivars that ripen consecutively with about 2 weeks between the first ripe dates between the cultivars (Table 1). WD1, WD3, and WD4 are clingstone whereas WD2 is a semifreestone white peach. All these have large fruit size (Table 1) and good to excellent flavor when properly managed and thinned. The mean soluble solids for these cultivars when picked mature ranged from 12.0 to 14.2 Brix. All have a creamy white ground color with a red blush over 30% to 80% of the fruit surface depending on the cultivar and environmental conditions.

Acknowledgement

The contribution of Takashi Haji of the National Institute of Fruit Tree Science at Tsukuba, Japan who supplied the pollen of ‘Chiyohime’ and of Lirong Wang of the Zhengzhou Fruit Research Institute in Zhengzhou, Henan, China who supplied the ‘Zaohongzhu’ pollen are gratefully acknowledged. These cultivars would not exist without their generous cooperation.

Figure 1. Chilling zones in

Texas.

Terrell

Fairfield

College Station

Floresville