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Annette Friday, Jim's daughter, learned fruit breeding from Andersen at MSU. She returned to the home farm Fruit Acres, and, with her husband, Randy Bjorge, bred and introduced the Stellar series of peach varieties, with the help of International Plant Management, a Michigan-based company. Dr. Amy Iezzoni, who followed Andersen at MSU and is best known as Michigan State University's tart cherry breeder, helped Paul Friday extend the peach harvest season by providing embryo rescue technology in her laboratory—a method that's vital to producing early varieties. With this and considerable work over three decades, Friday developed the Flamin' Fury series of peaches. Now aged 70, Friday released his 39th variety, called PF Fashionably Late, last year. His series now has peaches starting 22 days before Redhaven and extending to 54 days after Redhaven. "There may be a few more coming," he said this spring. "But my program is ending." The Bjorges over the years released 12 patented varieties, all with Star in their name, the latest being Sweetstar released last year. Earlystar comes in 18 days before Redhaven and Autumnstar finishes the year 39 days after Redhaven. "The Bjorges have not made any new crosses in over ten years," Shane said. "And Paul Friday stopped making crosses four or five years ago." Iezzoni starts program Meanwhile, the stage was being set to ramp up Michigan State Univer- sity's program, to have new varieties ready to go when the two private breeding programs had run their course. Amy Iezzoni at MSU reinitiated the MSU peach-breeding program in the 1980s, and in 1992, Bill Shane took over the breeding work. The Michigan Peach Sponsors, a grower group, cosponsored the MSU breeding program, with the goal of developing high quality varieties suit- able for the Michigan fresh-market industry. Southwest Michigan growers have cultivated a romance with Chicago, and many of their peaches move into farmers' market in that city and its suburbs a hundred miles away. Over the last 20 years, Michigan Peach Sponsors has contributed more than $100,000 to support the breeding effort. Canker resistance Iezzoni, working with MSU plant pathologist Dr. Gerard Adams and graduate student Wedong Chen, had initiated a long-term project to develop Leucostoma-tolerant peach varieties. Leucostoma canker, also called cytospora or valsa canker, is a fungal disease that causes limb decline in wet temperate climates, Shane said. They found, in varieties from Russia, peach selections with resistance to canker and crossed these with commercial varieties with the goal to obtain high-quality peach varieties with improved canker resistance. One variety has resulted from the Iezzoni-Shane work. Beaumont, a yellow-fleshed, fresh-market peach, was released in 2004, with the assis- tance of International Plant Management. Beaumont was named after Beaumont Tower, a landmark bell tower on the MSU campus in East Lansing. The older Haven name was chosen because the peach-breeding station under Johnston was at that time in South Haven. In the nearly 20 years since he began breeding, Shane made crosses B PLUM POX detour ill Shane's peach breeding pro- gram was put to a real test in 2006. In August of that year, plum pox was found in a single plum tree in the research block at the Michigan State University's Southwest Michigan Research and Extension Center near Benton Harbor, where Shane does his breeding work. Under the U.S. Department of Agri- culture's protocol governing this quar- antine disease, all trees within 500 meters of the infected tree had to be removed and destroyed. That included every peach tree in Shane's program at that station, as well as other stone fruits—23 acres in all. A rescue program, supported by the MSU GREEEN program, the Michigan Peach Sponsors, and the Michigan Department of Agriculture, was devel- oped that saved 83 of Shane's best elite lines. At a cost of over $1,000 each, they were sent to the National Clean Plant Network (then called the National Research Support Project 5) facility in Prosser, Washington, to be tested and cleansed if necessary. None were infected with plum pox. It was a real test, Shane recalls, for a breeder forced to decide, then and there, which lines to save and which to give up, forever. Luckily, Shane also had additional elite material in growers' orchards and at other Michigan State University sites, so not all material required the expensive Washington evaluation. In 2007, after the plum pox discov- and planted more than 24,000 seedlings, from which about 300 elite selections have been made. A number of these elite selections are in the orchards of growers and in Adams County Nursery and Stark Bro's Nursery, where they are being evaluated under nondisclosure test agreements. He expects, once all the patent application work is done, to release one yellow and two ery less than a year earlier, Shane resumed crossing work at the Trevor Nichols Research Station and at local farms, and continued work there until the quarantine was lifted at SWMREC in 2009. Peach, nectarine, plum, and apricot plantings resumed there in 2010. —R. Lehnert white selections soon, and is also working on two early yellow varieties. Shane expects most of his future releases will be, as he puts it, "classic yellow melting flesh peaches cho- sen to fill gaps in the profile of the Michigan peach industry." Most MSU program crosses are aimed at developing improved yellow, melting flesh peaches with emphasis on red skin color, size, firmness, and flavor, Shane said. A few crosses were aimed at improved canker resistance using commercial varieties crossed with seedlings from the Leucostoma-canker–tolerant selections identified by Iezzoni and Chen. A few crosses were made for development of improved white-fleshed peach varieties that would have better size and flesh firmness like California varieties but with the cold hardiness and bacterial spot resistance more typical of Michigan and Canadian varieties, Shane said. No naming scheme has been developed for future varieties. • New peach varieties from MSU are expected to fill the gaps in the profile of the Michigan peach industry. www.goodfruit.com GOOD FRUIT GROWER MAY 15, 2012 39 Photo courtesy of Washington state fruit coMMission