Fruitnut, I wrote a response to your last question on underwatered nectarines, but I guess it didn't get through the system. I'm familiar with the underwatering symptoms you have specified. I've had that problem, too. But I'm talking about fruit which looks damaged even before the blossoms wither. The thread which discusses thrips is linked below. I think you're right about overwatering. But after cherry season, I think the best commercial stone fruits in our area are the new supersweet nectarines, until later in the season when there are a few good varieties of commercial plums. Update on CWB, Peachcot, etc: This year, I got normal bloom on my Canadian White Blenheim. I think our area doesn't get enough chill some years. But I still had delayed foliation on Stark Sweetheart. So I guess CWB doesn't have the highest chill requirement in the world. I also had some other varieties with some bloom during CWB's late bloom season. But the rain during bloom seemed to decimate the crop. I didn't get any Harcot fruit this year. I thought I had a few young fruits, but next time I looked, there was nothing. Not even fallen fruits. It's always been a reliable variety for me before. Don't know if it was blossom blight or our freak wind storms this year. Or maybe our Garden Partner ate them. It's also odd that I got a decent crop of Blenheim during the same rainy bloom season. It's notorious for blossom blight. Maybe it's just luck - the days when bloom is heaviest vs. days when it rains. I only got 3 or 4 CWB fruits on 2 trees. I ate the first one today. It had fallen off the tree. It was much sweeter than Blenheim, with a rich flavor different from the typical apricot. Refreshing rather than "sprightly", though it still had a touch of acid. I think that this is the first one I've tasted which didn't get too much water while ripening. The texture was soft, but pleasant. The color is a creamy yellow-orange - not really close to white. No red blush. I would recommend CWB for areas with just a little more winter chill than ours. It needs a pollenizer which blooms late. It's a sweet pit variety. We've also been getting fruit from a tree which is either a Peachcot or a Golden Amber. The Golden Amber near the house has died. It never did well in its location. I bought the tree I now have as a Peachcot, but later learned that this was about the time the USDA mislabeled Peachcot scions which went to wholesaler LE Cooke in a virus elimination program. The next year, trees they sold as Peachcots were really Golden Amber. If you have one of their Peachcots which is older than 10 years old, you probably have their original strain. Peachcot trees sold after the error was corrected are probably a USDA stock variety, as far as I know. There's a nursery in Texas which sells an August-fruiting Peachcot with a low chill requirement. That idea always intrigued me. Anyway, I am not quite sure if I have a Peachcot now or a Golden Amber. Both my defunct Golden Amber and the alleged Peachcot bloom over a long season. Fruiting is more prolonged than with most other apricots. Last year, I was pretty confident my "Peachcot" was Golden Amber. But this year, the flavor of the ripe fruit makes me think it might be a Peachcot, after all. The very ripe fruits are quite large, very sweet and very soft, but with a melting quality rather than a grainy or mushy quality like, say, Royalty. And it may be my imagination, but I thought I tasted some peach with the apricot. Very nice. The tree is susceptible to premature fruit drop. It's not growing in the best soil. Though it has prolonged bloom, I don't recall any signs of delayed foliation here, so it's probably suitable for areas with moderately low chill. The fruits on my little volunteer apricot tree are almost ripe. I think I did fairly well in the volunteer fruit lottery. When almost ripe, the fruit is small, highly colored with a red blush, firm - crispy to rubbery, sweet and quite tasty. Freestone. Fuzz is very scant and some of the fruits got sun damage - ugly brown patches on the sun-exposed side. I think it may the the offspring of a commercial variety. The tree is brushy with lots of short branches off the main branches which resemble long thorns, though they're not really sharp. Branches are lax. Just one example of what you can get from planting an apricot seed. I'm getting my first Santa Rosa plums. A ripe Santa Rosa really lets you know you're alive. Sweet and sour with a variety of intense flavors coming from each layer inside the fruit. The Weeping Santa Rosa is sweeter with very nice flavor, but eating a regular Santa Rosa is still a unique experience which I really like. We have too many, though. Time to call my husband's sister, who makes jam. Here is a link that might be useful: nectarines and thrips

Not sure what ratio of ascorbic and citric acids to use. I think more citric acid than ascorbic, but I'm guessing. I think citric acid is a smaller molecule which tastes more acid in solution than vitamin C, measure for measure. Taste your vitamin C solution to make sure it doesn't have an objectionable bitter quality at the concentration you are thinking about using. I'll start with the measurements for Fruit Fresh solution, then estimate smaller amounts of the pure acids to compensate for the sugars in fruit Fresh. Tasting is another way to estimate how much I'll need. I'll compare the sourness of my solution to lemon juice. Concerning Fruitnut's question on drying fruit with the skin on, I believe that some fruits can be blanched or steam-treated to disrupt the skin to make drying more effective. A dilute lye solution might also work. Think I've read something about this with regard to prunes. I think some varieties of prunes require some sort of treatment to disrupt the integrity of the skin in order to dry successfully. Here in California, Thompson Seedless grapes are dried in the sun without any treatment to make raisins. I've helped cut grapes, laid them out on paper and helped roll them after drying so they can be picked up for processing. A hot and sticky-dirty job. Larger grapes might benefit from some sort of treatment to disrupt the skin.

I thought I'd respond to your interest in some of the Honey line of nectarines. At DWN they grow more than 1100 different types of fruit trees each year and offering every product to every market is a great way to confuse people and dilute their ability to get the right fruit to the right markets. You are right, Honey Blaze is an excellent nectarine, one of the most widely planted nectarines in the world in terms of acreage. However, it needs a lot of heat to generate its true potential as such it has a limited geographic appeal as a home garden or wholesale variety. Honey Kist, which ripens roughly the same time, has more predictable flavor and a wider geographic adaptation which is one of the reasons it is available in their retail division. Honey May, is only suitable for very low chill locations. Honey Diva is a pretty late variety which will harvest in the mid to late September range unless you are in the southwestern states. Again, that limits who can grow it successfully. I'm confident that Dave Wilson has no less than a dozen sub-acid nectarines that are in Honey Blaze's time slot for maturity but every fruit has it's own limitations. There is no universal fruit for all locations, for all palattes or for the range in grower ability. Likewise, it would be impractical to offer all twelve selections at your local or mail order nursery. The staff of your local retailer would go crazy trying to understand the nuances of each variety. I'm sure that dividing the market amongst the dozen in the example will drive up the costs as well. But I agree, and submit that all of the Honies are great nectarines.

I haven't noticed anise flavor in any yet. But I did have a well-ripened one earlier this week (10/23). It was one of the few apples I didn't bag. There were no bug bites, but it had some skin problems, bordering on ugly. It sized pretty well and tasted great. The brix ranged from 16.3 to 19.7, the highest I've seen this year from my Goldrush by quite a bit (next highest topped out at just under 16, 11 days earlier). There were definately 2 different flavors at work. The darker yellow/gold was sweeter and while interesting, didn't have the strong lemony flavor that the paler part had. Though they were different, I liked both parts quite a bit.