Following last month’s column about Rons Seedling and the RASP project, I have had this most interesting reply from Peter Kennedy in Young. Peter was with NSW agriculture at the time, and this is his recollection of events in relation to Rons and Supreme.
Remember this happened over 20 years ago! We are grateful to Peter for his response.
As mentioned [in Ken’s article] the RASP group was originally set up under a contract with the DPI in NSW to produce virus free propagation material of the two varieties, Rons Seedling and Supreme.
The work was done at the Biological and Chemical Research Institute (BCRI) at Rydalmere in Sydney under the guidance of Dr. Michael Barkley.
From memory there were about 50 members in the RASP group.
The first release of wood was rationed out amongst the members with great anticipation, but I think at the time Dr. Barkley thought the varieties had only partly been cleaned up. This seemed a bit odd.
Subsequent releases were meant to be completely clean but the problem now was that we had a couple of releases of propagating wood of unknown quality.
A number of growers gave this wood to various nurseries to propagate trees for them, while others propagated trees themselves.
A mother tree of each came back to Young for reference and propagation material, while other trees were kept at BCRI in Sydney for the same reason.
After several years the various releases flowered and fruited. The result seemed to be the same across all releases for both varieties—the fruit was generally soft, had a longer stem and was smaller; the trees were more vigorous.
Most of the group were disappointed and I think have reverted to using their own selections.
I suspect the mother trees were thrown out although I am not sure, as Dr. Barkley has long since retired and BCRI was moved to Camden.
What wood was released to the nurseries I am not sure. I suspect that they used some of the wood given to them by growers for their own purposes and I do not recall any specific agreement between the RASP group and any nursery. I could be wrong.
I think we were going to wait and see what the fruit looked like before making any agreements. After we saw the results, interest in the project faded, so who knows what wood the various nurseries ended up with.
Unfortunately it meant that many local growers believed that virus free propagation material in general—but especially of Rons and Supreme—was inferior to infected wood.
The fruit of the tree at Prosser [mentioned in Ken’s article] was more like the original Rons—short stem, firm and of reasonable size.
Future
Discussion should now focus on how inferior stains of these cultivars might be removed from further multiplication; and on ensuring wood selection is checked and authenticated by nurseries for grower benefit.
See this article in Tree Fruit August 2013
