What happens when we skip a day picking squash?

They just keep growing.  A few of zucchinis are stuffing size now.

The squash we should have picked yesterday, plus today's harvest, is below with some windfall Flavor Delight Apriums and Harcot Apricots (the ones with the red blush).  These two varieties are well-adapted here, along with the apricots Golden Sweet (commercial variety, just coming off patent and becoming available for home growers), Robada (commercial, sweet pit variety, needs a pollenizer, developed by USDA) and Tomcot (best with a pollenizer)

Today was the best gardening day we've had in a while.  I also transplanted some extra seedlings from a row of melons.  They HATE that when they have true leaves, but I think some of them will make it.  Tied up the cucumbers, too.

I'm not much on gardening in containers in summer in our hot climate, but I planted Red Russian kale in a pot with some chrysanthemums last fall.  I used it often in salads with angel hair-cut cabbage.  It is more tender than most kale varieties.

It's bolting now.  You can see its skinny seedheads and yellow blossoms behind the chrysanthemums, which seem to have picked an odd time to bloom again.  The color of Red Russian kale is great with chrysanthemums with blue-green leaves and purplish or pink flowers.

I also threw caution to the wind this year and planted some peppers (Mariachi and Monster Jalapeno) in a pot with some marigolds.  They're next to a pot o' ground cherries (first time I'm trying these), in the afternoon shade of a couple of big English roses.  Most places, I would not recommend shade for hot peppers.  Here, in a pot, yes.  I'll let you know how they do.

Melons as Cucumbers? Plus: Apricots! and a Garden Update

MELONS AS CUCUMBERS
For me, part of the fun of gardening is doing a little experimentation.  Last year, I tried hybridizing a new melon variety:  Bidwell Casaba x Small Persian, to see if I would come up with anything close to a Crenshaw melon (the Crenshaw is reported to be derived from a Casaba and a Persian melon).  Maybe we'll see this summer.  Plants are in the ground along with some of our favorite melon varieties and a couple of new ones.

This year, I lost some of my cucumber seedlings to damping off fungus.  So on the cucumber trellis, I'm trying some melons which I plan to try harvesting as cucumbers. "Armenian Cucumbers" and related varieties like "Painted Serpent Cucumbers" are actually melons, after all. True cucumbers have a hard time producing palatable, non-bitter fruit here because of the heat and because it is hard to maintain an even water level in the soil. The variety Summer Dance is the best I've found so far here, and it must be grown vertically or in part shade in this climate. This year, I'm also giving a few other varieties a spot in the garden, in addition to the "melon as cuke" experiment. I'm not including Armenian, because of the folk tradition that growing it near regular melons will change their taste. Not sure it's true.  But why let this idea interfere with my experiment?

 One year, our late, great dog Sparky was trying to harvest a melon (Piel de Sapo type) and accidentally pulled up the whole plant.  He loved Summer Dance cucumbers, so I figured he mistook the melon for a cucumber.  We used some of the immature melons he pulled up with the plant like cucumbers (peeled and seeded).  They were sweeter than cucumbers, but quite similar. Our neighbor at the time told me that in the old days, his family ate immature honeydews as cucumbers. Yesterday, I planted out six varieties of melons on the cucumber trellis, along with a late planting of  "Summer Dance" cucumber and  "Poona Kheera (a brown-skinned cucumber from India). The melons are:

Honeydew Gold Rind: A honeydew melon which turns golden when ripe. Not too sweet, according to the description. From Willhite, 2005 seed. Pick on full slip if using as a melon.

Sprite: A crispy little white Asian melon. Tiny seeds from 1998 AND 2001. We'll see if they germinate.

Bartlett Hybrid honeydew from Burpee. 2007 seed. They've discontinued this one, which is why I got it on their bargain page in 2007. Supposed to taste like a Bartlett pear.

Lambkin: an early Piel de Sapo type hybrid with yellower skin. Kind of defeats the purpose of having a winter storage melon here if it matures early, so why not use as a cucumber?

Golden Crispy hybrid: another discontinued hybrid, not too different from this one. Crisp little melons are popular in Asia.

Gold Bar hybrid: Park bills this as the first cucumber/melon cross: a cross of Cucumis sativas (a cucumber) and Cucumis hystrix (a melon). But information I see on C. hystrix calls it the closest cousin to the cucumber. It's not a regular melon. It's hard to cross a cucumber with the melons we are familiar with. Even this cross-species "melon" has been hard for me to grown. Last chance for this batch of seeds.

Update: June 8, Lambkin and Summer Dance sprouted in their little seed protectors, which have now been removed Pictures of those later.

APRICOTS: We got our first apricot on June 2, a Royalty (not Royal). Second one yesterday.  Quality is much better than usual, probably due to the cooler weather this year. Not as mushy this year.  Maybe it's gotten less water during ripening than usual, too.  This is a really big apricot, and the fruits stayed on the tree in our recent windstorms (it's billed as a wind-resistant variety). I'm thinking that this is a good variety for the Salinas Valley.  It's a semi-freestone and there are other varieties out there which taste better.  But it's still an apricot.

Update:  On June 7, I picked our first Blenheim apricots which matured in reasonable weather.  No comparison with Royalty.  Blenheim's depth of flavor was remarkable, and its texture is far superior.  No wonder people go on orchard tours in the Santa Rosa Valley to taste it.  The variety Golden Sweet is said by Andy Mariani to be very similar, but more resistant to pitburn and brown rot.  I just have to convince a nursery to pick some up from the commercial vendor.  There should be some super-sweet varieties coming onto the nursery market soon, too.

I also picked a Harcot on June 8.  It was bigger than Blenheim, but not as big as Royalty.  Quality is much better than Royalty, not as good as Blenheim.  It's better suited to our climate, though.  Flavor Delight Aprium also has some ripe fruits.  Usually they ripen before or with Royalty.  They rank just under Harcot for flavor.  They're quite reliable here.

FRUIT TREES:  I finally got around to whitewashing the trunks of the new Pluot trees yesterday:  a Flavor King to replace the one Sparky's bathtub killed, a Flavor Grenade to replace the one Little Buddy chewed up when he was a puppy, and a Splash.  You're supposed to use a cheap white latex interior paint, diluted with an equal part of water.  I found a little jar of paint used for testing mixed paint colors which was perfect for this use.  I also renewed the whitewash on the cherry trees.

ONIONS AND LETTUCE: F. planted a bunch of seed for a short-day purple onion this spring, and they're bolting, so I advised him to dig them up. It's hard for him to understand that you plant some kinds of onions in spring and other kinds in fall. But he buries all onions so deep that they won't bulb up, anyway. These are woody, but he harvested and bunched them like scallions, anyway. Tied them with an onion stem.  He hates to waste food. We give him some space in the garden to grow the things he likes. He does better with tomatoes and winter squash than with onions. He also transplanted some lettuce a couple of weeks ago which was already too bitter to eat after a warm spell. He really hates waste, and I think he intended to grow it out for seed.  More seed than we could ever use. It's a pretty, but inferior, variety - a volunteer with tough, frilly leaves. I pulled them and put them in the compost bin so he wouldn't have to. There are still some in the front yard. He had started to transplant those to his garden plot, too. But I stopped him. Think I'll try to keep them from going to seed after they bloom. We have lots of lettuce seeds.

TOMATOES: I saw my first sphinx moth of the year last night. It's a shame that these fascinating moths lay eggs which turn into such destructive caterpillars. It will be time to break out the Bt spray (one of the most effective, specific biological insect controls around) soon, as the moths begin to lay eggs on the tomatoes. You can see the difference between a tobacco hornworm and a tomato hornworm if you scroll down here. I think the tobacco hornworm is more common in our garden. I only saw one of them on the tomatoes last year. Only sprayed Bt once. We also get the white-lined sphinx moth here. It's a beauty. According to Wikipedia, the caterpillars feed on tomatoes as well as a wide range of other plants. I'm not sure I've ever seen one on a tomato plant, though. Other sources don't seem to list tomato as a host. This is the green color variation of the caterpillar. Uncle Kent told us years ago about having to drive over a migration of green caterpillars in the Arizona desert. Guess it might have been these.

Our first tomato will be ripe soon. It's turning red. It's on an Early Girl plant we bought at a promotion at Home Depot in a gallon pot for about a dollar. The Ace we bought at the same time has good-sized fruit on it, too. I shaded the exposed ones yesterday with aluminum foil. Many of the other tomatoes bought as smaller plants also have fruit.

It's the fourth of June, and this is a late year for tomatoes here, but the fourth of June seems pretty early for a ripe tomato to people in most of the country.  The name of the Fourth of July tomato doesn't mean as much in areas like this as it does in the North, and it's not offered in nurseries here. I didn't grow it this year because I didn't start plants from seed. Tough skin, but does well in the heat here, becoming very sweet. But I may be planting Moravsky Div (Wonder of Moravia) as my really early tomato next year. Recommended by heirloom tomato expert Carolyn Male. Along with Bulgarian Triumph as a later, small, sweet tomato.

The lanky potato-leafed plant I bought as an Early Girl has largely recovered from its early sickly appearance and has some small fruits on it. Though the plant is not what you would call "lush" at this point. It's probably the maternal parent of Early Girl, which is reported to be a potato-leafed cultivar. There were lots of potato-leafed plants among the Early Girls at nurseries and box stores this year. Somebody left some self-pollenized tomatoes on the plant during production of the hybrid seeds, apparently. I'm surprised that this doesn't happen more often.

Pluots and Sugar Plums

Last week, I picked samples of three varieties of Pluots and our only European plum:

The yellow ones at the top are Flavor Queen Pluots:  Pure sweetness - too sweet for some people when fully ripe.  Clingstone.  This variety does not set fruit easily.  I only have a few fruits this year.

To the right are Geo Pride Pluots - tender, flavorful, sweet.  Semi-freestone when soft-ripe.

At the bottom are this year's first Sugar Plums - a small European variety which survives in our climate.  They can be dried into prunes without special treatment.  Sweet, like the typical prune-plum.

On the left are Dapple Dandy Pluots:  Bumper crop this year, as most years.  Firm, clingstone.

Summer Fruits

It's been seasonably hot - with highs around 100 degrees for several days, almost 40 degrees cooler just before sunup.  The peaches and nectarines appreciate the weather more than the plums and Pluots do.  But we have an assortment right now.  Here is a platter full of fruits:

At the top are July Elberta peaches - freestone, suitable for canning (much less firm than cling peaches), great for jam, old-fashioned yellow peach flavor fresh.  To the right are some of the last Heavenly White Nectarines - also freestone.  Sweet, growing on a vigorous tree.  Skin is slightly tough.  I may not have watered enough when they were small.  I would have bigger fruits on both of the varieties above if I had thinned more carefully.

Below the Heavenly White nectarines are some Burgundy plums.   They are sweet, firm, quite mild and red all the way through.  They hang well on the tree for quite a while without losing quality.  Some people find them similar to Bing cherries.  Clingstone.  Recommended for drying if you're patient enough to cut the fruit off the pit.  The blossoms are self-pollenizing and it is a good pollenizer for second-early blooming plums and Pluots.

At the bottom are Snow Beauty peaches.  Freestone.  A very nice white peach for California.  Above them, in the center, are Fantasia nectarines - an old-fashioned, very flavorful variety - not as sweet as some of the newer ones.  Freestone.  A great fruit.  I learned from "Fruitnut" on the Garden Web that this variety may not produce fruit if not watered well early in the season.  I did better this year.

To the left are Dapple Dandy Pluots - the most well-known commercial Pluot.  It was once promoted as "dinosaur eggs".  Some of the mottled skin coloration comes from a plum parent - Mariposa.  They grow on a vigorous, prolific tree.  The fruit is firm and sweet.  Clingstone.  Not the most flavorful Pluot available, but still very tasty.  There are some similar-looking varieties which ripen at different seasons which are very inferior in flavor.  Their inferior flavor is even noted in the wholesale catalog for the trees.  So try to make sure you get the real "Dapple Dandy" if you buy some at a farmer's market or something.

Cucumbers, Climbing Squash Plants, Fruit Tree Pests

Below is a photo of the cucumbers I picked yesterday, with some of the tomatoes we picked at the same time.  We got some LONG cucumbers.  At the bottom are two Natsuhikari - our first of the season.  Then a ribbed Suhyo TK, then the tomatoes, then several Summer Dance cucumbers - not all as perfect as they usually are.

We've had a spider mite invasion of several of our stone fruit trees.  Today I sprayed the Heavenly White Nectarine tree pictured below with a jet of water.  Much to the consternation of our dog, Maggie.  The tree is due for some extra pruning this summer.  It's currently losing a few leaves due to the mites.  Hope rinsing off the leaves gives predators of the mites a chance.  They're very difficult to control with insecticides.   You can see one of F's winter squash plants climbing the tree.  He planted several of them where they would tend to overtake our plants.

Below is our drenched Warrior Princess Maggie resting after her epic battle with the water hose.

First Plums and Pluots

Below is a plate showing, at the top, the superlative Flavor Supreme Pluot, the classic Santa Rosa Plum on the left and Weeping Santa Rosa at the bottom.  There is a whole and a cut fruit if each variety .  These were picked last week, just as our apricots were finishing up.

Flavor Supreme has lots of sweetness, similar in this way to a typical European plum, but with sprightliness and complex flavor characteristic of an Asian plum.  It has a little apricot in its background, along with Santa Rosa and Mariposa plums, which are common in the parent lines of new varieties of plums and Pluots.  It tastes best when it first starts to soften, while the skin is still mostly green.  It has a bit of crispness at this point.  Eventually, the flesh will turn a deep maroon, but by then much of the complex flavor will be gone.   My experience this year has been that the fruit can develop a slightly "cooked" or oxidized flavor if it ripens when the temperature gets to 107 degrees.  Fruits which ripened after the high heat (daytime highs of about 92 to 99 degrees) were far better.  The same was true for the plums below.

Flavor Supreme grows on a vigorous tree with big leaves, but its blossoms are not very attractive to bees.  It's a good idea to graft in some early-blooming pollenizers, like the old California commercial plum, Inca, or one of the other early-blooming Pluots.  Or, you can plant your pollenizers very close to the Flavor Supreme, or bring over some vases full of blooming branches to place in the tree.  Right now, the tree is afflicted with spider mites, and as soon as all the fruit are picked, it's going to be pruned and blasted with a jet of water in the mornings.  I've already started spraying the tree with water, trying to avoid the fruit as much as possible.

This year,  the fruit is ripening with Santa Rosa, indicating that rain prevented setting of the earliest blooms.  As with our apricots.   Normally, Flavor Supreme starts to ripen well before Santa Rosa.

Santa Rosa is the classic California Asian plum, introduced by the legendary breeder Luther Burbank.  It is tart at the pit and astringent under the skin, with a sweet layer in between which has a lushly complex flavor.  It tastes a bit "wild".  It is not sweet or firm enough for some modern tastes, but this is a fruit that lets you know you're alive when you eat it.   A Santa Rosa at its peak is, in my opinion, a wonderful thing.  Some people peel it before eating.   Like Flavor Supreme, it loses flavor if over-ripe.  It makes very flavorful jams and jellies.  Leave the skins on.

The blossoms are self-pollenizing, and this tree is the classic pollenizer for Asian plums and Pluots which need cross-pollination.  It has a wide climate adaptability.  The tree is vigorous and easy to care for.  Perhaps too vigorous for some people.  Summer pruning is key to controlling its size.  If compatible with your soil, you could also consider planting it on a dwarfing rootstock (the same is true of Flavor Supreme, another vigorous tree).

Weeping Santa Rosa is a Floyd Zaiger development, like Flavor Supreme Pluot.  It's one of his earlier releases, now off patent.  The fruits grow on a tree with a weeping habit.  It is a little sweeter that Santa Rosa (wins taste tests) and ripens slightly later than Santa Rosa.  It can be picked when a little firmer and still have great flavor.

Below is our plate of fruit under the Weeping Santa Rosa tree by our front walk.  You can see a couple of fruits hanging from the tree next to the daylily blossom.   The cut fruit in the photo above is slightly under-ripe.  At perfection, the flesh will have a slight rosy blush, a little less than the photo of the Santa Rosa fruit on the left.

Like Santa Rosa, its blossoms are self-pollenizing and can pollenize other varieties.  The tree is often grafted onto dwarfing rootstock for ornamental use, but you can also prune it to the shape you like.  It has a wider climate adaptability than Flavor Supreme, but probably not as wide as Santa Rosa.  The little flower underneath is a cross between a Martha Washington geranium (well, pelargonium) and a scented species.  It survives in our climate better than the true Martha Washington types.  But the bloom you see lost a petal during the photo session, and it may be our last for the year.

First Cucumbers, More Tomatoes

We are starting to get temperatures in the mid-nineties now with 102 forecast for Sunday. Usually this time of year, we ahve had several triple-digit days. The wonderful Blenheim apricots which are now ripening don't have pit-burn this year. We were lucky with this variety this year.

Pictured below, our second cucumbers from the garden (we ate the Cool Breeze before taking a picture).  The ridged one in front is Suhyo TK.  The one in back is our standby, Summer Dance.  Also pictured are some new tomato varieties. Along the edge of the plate above the Summer Dance cucumber is Rosalita. To their left, a heavily-ridged, squat Aunt Ginny's Purple with blossom end rot on the bottom where you can't see it. Beneath are two Early Challenge fruits and between the cucumbers is a plum-shaped Barbara fruit which probably could have stayed on the vine another day. IDs continue below the photo.

Beneath the blossom end of the Suhyo TK cucumber is a little Fourth of July fruit and our largest fruit so far, other than Cosmonaut Volkov, First Lady II. Lined up against the cucumber are three Berkeley Tie-Dye fruits. You may not be able to see the stripes, but there is some faint striping. The smaller fruits in front are Yellow Submarine, Black Cherry and Pop-Ins.

The plate is next to one of F's squash plants. He seems to have planted them where they will overtake many of the plants we planted. He believes that any seed which naturally sprouts in the garden will produce better than a "foreign" seed. At one time, when people planted single varieties, this may have been true. But we get some strange squashes from the F2 generation, offspring of hybrids from the year before.

First Cucumbers

Cool Breeze: Short, stubby gherkin, probably a little larger than you would pick for sweet pickles. Light color. Very crispy, sweet. The plants are not happy where they are planted. Don't think I will get many more fruits. Produces before many other varieties, but is not a heroically heat-tolerant variety like Summer Dance.  It needs to be grown on a trellis here.

Suhyo TK: Deeply ridged. Did not peel. Trace of bitterness at stem end, astringent (not in a particularly  unpleasant way, tender). Would be a good variety for making cucumber facials.  Would probably have some bitterness in hotter weather.  This is a tough climate for cucumbers.

Summer Dance: As usual, sweet and tender even with the skin on. No bitterness. A great cucumber for our climate.

More Tomato varieties, following up on our first harvest

On June 18 I picked:

Cosmonaut Volkov: A good-sized tomato, tasty and mildly sweet with light red flesh. Peeled easily without blanching (so did a fully-ripe Fourth of July). Assuming that a certain toddler didn't switch the labels when we planted this section.

First impression of tomatoes picked June 22 and 23:

Pop-ins: Variable red pear or teardrop type, bigger than typical yellow pears. Juicy, pleasant.
Rosalita: Rosy grape tomato with tiny white dots. Sweet, nice fruit.
Yellow Submarine: Bigger than the typical yellow pear. Flavorful.
Black Cherry: Very flavorful. Gel around seeds is green, as expected. I liked the fruits with a touch of green on the shoulder best. Lots of "black" tomatoes are ripe when they still show some green. There was no cracking. This variety is known to crack in some conditions.

First Lady II: Hard to peel when raw, OK for an early tomato, kind of bland.
Early Challenge: Smaller than First Lady II, easier to peel, slightly tastier
Berkeley Tie-Dye: Not as much striping as I expected. Gel around seeds is tart, as expected. Soft flesh. Not as flavorful as I expected. Maybe too ripe?
Aunt Ginny's Purple: Not ripe - picked early because of blossom end rot.
Fourth of July: Fruit ripened in warmer weather is sweeter than the first fruit we got.  In my past experience, the flavor of this variety has stood out when the weather got hot.  Fruits are relatively hard to peel raw unless very ripe.  This is a shame, because the skins are tough.

Update, June 26

Stone Fruits: Yesterday, Marcela came by for some spricots. The little fruits from my volunteer tree are flavorful, sweet-tart and firm, sometimes a little tough or crunchy. Seems more and more like the offspring of a commercial variety. Golden Amber is big, very soft and flavorful. Softer and bigger than Blenheim. I'm not so sure that it's immune to pit burn, as described in catalogs, but it's a good late apricot.  We didn't get much of an extended harvest this year due to rain during the bloom season.

Today, I picked a peck or so of Blenheim apricots - luxurious this year with more moderate temperatures. Temperatures are warm enough - mid-nineties - to sweeten up the Arctic Star nectarines. The soft ones are really sugary now.

The Santa Rosa plums at the side of the house are ripening, before the few Flavor Supreme Pluots, which normally start ripening first.   Santa Rosas are a jolt of tangy flavor, -- too flavorful for some modern tastes.

Cucumbers and squash: I picked a bunch more Summer Dance cucumbers today - smaller than you would see them in the store. More luxury. Not much going on with the other varieties. Lots of squash on now. Magda is prolific. Diplomat and Kojac are both nice, standard green zucchinis. I pulled up a couple of F.'s volunteer plants which had turned yellow.

Tomatoes: More varieties ripe for the first time this year:

Boondocks Mystery: The mis-labeled Boondocks plant turns out to be a mid-sized clear yellow tomato. Somewhat tart. Plant is diaseased, may come out soon.

Brandy Boy Mystery: The second plant with a purchased plant of Brandy Boy turned out to be a big, mealy yellow pear-type tomato.

Beam's Yellow Pear: Tasty, but not as tasty as Yellow Submarine. Both are thicker at the neck than the common little bland, cute-as-a-bug yellow pear tomato.

Napa Grape:  Juicy for a grape tomato.  Nice flavor.

Jet Setter: Mid-sized, tasty, quite easy to peel without blanching. One was craced at the stem end, the other wasn't

Better Boy: Tasty as usual. A little softer that Jet Setter. I preferred its flavor today.

Moskvich: Picked an under-ripe one with blossom end rot. Ditto Cosmonaut Volkov, from my first plant. The one picked from the fence resembles it in appearance, so it was probably identified correctly.

First Stone Fruits, 2010

We had a difficult spring for stone fruits this year - lots of rain during blossom time. For the first time, fruit set was sparse on Flavor Delight Aprium. Also on Royalty and Golden Amber apricots, plus my favorite, Harcot. Not much going on with Canadian White Blenheim, either, but this is no surprise, as it needs a late pollinator and is in a marginal zone for winter chill here.

On the other hand, we got a good fruit set on Blenheim apricot, a disease-prone variety. And it is starting to ripen before temperatures reach 100 degrees - unusual around here. No pit burn. It's a great fruit if you're in a climate which is friendly to it.   For example, if you live in Santa Rosa, in what was once called "The Valley of Heart's Delight" based partly on the fruits grown there.  Various apricot varieties can be quite picky about the climates they prefer.  Apricot success here  this year is all about the weather.

Back to the start of the harvest season: Our first fruits were little Royal Rosa apricots. They were better this year than in the past. I think that their water was restricted a little as they ripened. They also need to be dead-ripe before you pick them, or they are bland.

Next came Flavor Delight Apriums - nice fruits - and Royalty (Not Royal), a big, mushy fruit on wind-resistant spurs which David likes because it reminds him of his Grandpa's apricots.

Harcots started soon after Flavor Delight. Not many of them, but they were big and luscious.

Some of them are pictured above with Flavor Delight apriums, a little yellow plumcot (blushing to red) from LE Cooke wholesalers and Arctic Star nectarine. The plumcot is an interesting fruit: soft and tender.  It loses quality when it goes beyond yellow with a little blush. It has a little bit of a delicate floral flavor. At its best, it's sweet, but can also tend toward being insipid. I think of them as resembling a wild fruit. Wild fruits seem to come in two main types - highly flavored and tart or even astringent, or slightly sweet and tending toward the insipid. This fruit is closer to the latter category. Some people really like them a lot. I think they would be good combined with cranberries for a less-assertive sauce.

They tend to ripen over a very short period of time, especially in years hotter than this one. The tree is compact and attractive, with nice leaves and showier blossoms than most plums grown for fruit. It's easy to care for. It blooms late in the plum season here, and it may cross-pollinate Emerald Beaut - a prized variety of plum. It takes a few years to start blooming, and often blooms on main branches.

Arctic Star white nectarine (the reddish fruit in the picture) are one of breeder  Floyd Zaiger's great family of super-sweet fruits. They can be enjoyed firm-ripe or soft and very sweet. The fruits should be thinned more than I thinned them this year, given ample water until they start to ripen, and protected from insects through dormant spraying, garden cleanup, etc. This will help prevent the bitter almond off-flavors and stunted fruits which can occur in white nectarines.