With the novel coronavirus keeping everyone stuck at home, 2020 has been a year of gardening and house plant accumulation for many of us. By now, you’ve presumably named all your houseplants and already started your winter vegetable garden, so you might be thinking of broadening your horizons: Like say, getting a fruit tree?
Plenty of fruit trees grow well in Southern California, and many were developed here, from the citrus plants cultivated as part of UC Riverside’s Citrus Variety Collection to the low-winter chill peaches bred at Chaffey College. Even popular varieties of apple just kind of developed on their own here.
“There are literally hundreds of varieties that originated in Southern California,” said Tom Spellman, southwestern sales manager for Dave Wilson’s Nursery, which grows more than 13 million fruit and nut trees per year to sell to both to orchards and commercial nurseries. “This was a fruit-breeding mecca.”
What to know before you grow: There are certain times that are best for planting things, and while fall is a great time to plant certain kinds of fruit trees such as apples and stone fruit you’re probably going to want to hold off on the citrus until the spring. That’s when the threat of frost has passed but it’s still somewhat cool.
Be sure, also, to check with your local nursery to make sure that you’re planting your tree at the right time for your area.
In this piece, we’ll look at some locally developed avocados, citrus, stone fruit and apples that are both easy to find at nurseries and easy to grow in Southern California. Plus, we’ll provide some of the local color on how they came to be.
Not only can the following Southern California varieties be found at nurseries, but they also include a unique piece of California history to share along with the lovely fruit you’ll grow.
Avocados
Hass avocado: Popular on supermarket shelves and prized by home growers, this avocado has its origin in La Habra Heights. The mother tree was one of multiple seeds planted in a grove there. When the tree started producing dark-skinned, pebbly avocados, growers weren’t exactly enamored. Most varieties at the time had smooth green skin.
“Nobody is going to want to this,’” Spellman said was the initial response — until they tried it. “And they started to realize that the flavor is really good.”
Spellman said some other benefits of this avocado was that it held onto the tree longer than other locally popular varieties such as Zutano, Bacon and Fuerte, and its thick skin made it a better choice for shipping. The owner of the grove, Rudolph Hass, patented the variety under his name in 1935, but with plant patents difficult to enforce he didn’t make a whole lot of money off his unique avocado variety.
Citrus
Some popular commercial varieties in backyards today come from research conducted at the University of California, Riverside’s citrus breeding program.
Oroblanco grapefruit: Tracy L. Kahn, curator and endowed chair of the Givaudan Citrus Variety Collection at UC Riverside, said one of those is the Oroblanco, which is a crossbreed between the grapefruit and a lower acid pummelo. The pale yellow and seedless citrus fruit have a mild and sweet taste and they tend to mature earlier. “Grapefruits are just getting good in the spring and summer, and oroblanco is really more of a winter fruit,” she said.
Gold Nugget Mandarin: “Gold Nugget is interesting because it’s a product of the entire history of the UCR breeding program,” Kahn said. She said that Howard B. Frost, who began work in citrus breeding when UC Riverside was still the UC Citrus Experiment Station, was instrumental in creating some of the very first citrus crosses between various citrus varieties in the early 1900s, including the Kincy and Wilking varieties of mandarin.
In the mid-1900s, James W. Cameron and Robert K. Soost further bred those varieties together to create what would eventually become Gold Nugget. Researchers Mikael Roose finished the research to determine if Gold Nugget had the characteristics of a commercial variety. A description from Roose and fellow researcher Tim Williams from March 2008 notes that the fruit is a deep orange in color with a rich flavor and is extremely sweet when mature.
Peaches and nectarines
What’s today known as Armstrong Garden Centers was once Ontario-based Armstrong Nursery, which produced many popular varieties of fruit trees as well as roses during the mid-20th century. (The company now no longer breeds plants, just sells them.)
Snow Queen nectarine: One of these was the Snow Queen Nectarine, which Spellman said was one of the first commercially viable varieties of white-fleshed nectarine because it had a thicker skin and didn’t bruise as easily as other varieties. Spellman said it’s still one of the most popular backyard varieties in the Southwestern United States.
Bonanza peach: Armstrong also produced one of the first genetic dwarf peach varieties. The trees stay relatively small — between 5 and 7 feet. The sweet, yellow-fleshed peaches remain one of the most popular true miniature dwarf peaches on the market, according to Spellman.
Armstrong wasn’t the only business in the area producing new varieties of peaches. Chaffey College was also producing new versions of the fruit when it was located in Ontario.
“From around the 1930s to the late 1940s, they developed 14 different varieties of stone fruit and most of these were early producers and low chill varieties,” said Frank McDonough, a botanical information consultant for The Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanic Garden
Low-chill varieties are fruit tree varieties that don’t need as many hours of exposure to cold weather over the winter to be able set fruit later in the year, which makes them good choices for Southern California’s climate.
Early Babcock peach: One variety that you can still sometimes find in nurseries, McDonough said, is the Early Babcock Peach. The fruits have a light pink skin and white flesh. Online descriptions of the peach say that it is sweet and juicy and low in acid.
Apples
Pettingill apple: The story of this apple, which is still sold by commercial nurseries, starts in Seal Beach. The apple is named after Clark Pettingill who discovered it in his yard in after it had likely grown from a seed in an apple core.
In an archived October 12, 1958 article in the Long Beach Press-Telegram, Pettingill talked about his prized apple.
“Twenty-five years ago, or maybe it was 30 years, I don’t just recall,” Pettingill said in the article. “Two young apple trees came up side by side, so close as almost to make contact, in my yard. I think they came from the same apple core.”
Pettingill eventually separated the trees, keeping one in the front yard and the other in his backyard. The highly successful tree in the front was patented by Armstrong Nursery. The low-chill apple — meaning it does not require as many hours of cold weather as other apple types to make apples — is described as being crisp, juicy and slightly acidic in online descriptions from nurseries.
Gordon apple: An apple variety liked by Spellman, the sales manager at Dave Wilson Nursery, is the Gordon apple. Spellman said the apple is named after a real estate broker from Whittier who discovered the tree coming up from a mulch pile in his backyard. The fruit was big, juicy and had a nice crispy crunch flavor to it, Spellman said. He said it was also self-fruitful meaning it didn’t require a cross-pollinator (another variety of apple tree) to make its apples. Spellman said the variety took off in the mid to late ’70s and had great acceptance throughout Southern California. Like Pettingill, it doesn’t require as many hours of cold.
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