Pictures from mulberry and stone fruit tasting at the USDA Wolfskill station. May 23, 2015

The event was organized by John Preece (station leader), Jenny Smith (mulberry, kiwi, persimmons), and Carolyn DeBuse (stone fruits).

The most important piece of info from John's talk for me was that the repository will not be accepting individual orders for the plant material anymore. They were overwhelmed with the orders they were asked to fulfill this spring and they are not done with them yet.  They simply do not have the resources to continue with this kind of practice.  They still will be supplying material to the institutional researches and to the growers organizations like GRFG. So we will need to do the organizational orders.  Probably good places to announce it are chapter meetings and the Festival of Fruit.

Carolyn presented the earliest stone fruit cultivars available.  The pictures below show them all.  I maybe interested to get the early white peach Springtime and the small yellow plum Gavoro to my yard.

Jenny presented mulberries, and everything what was there is below in the pictures.  My favorite was Pakistan mulberry.  She also mentioned that most of their mulberry collection is not ripe yet. However, they are always asked for the Pakistan variety, so they decided to organize the tasting when Pakistan is ready.