By Frank Giles
The University of Florida (UF) blueberry breeding team hosted a farm tour last week to showcase commercially available and varieties in development at stops in Arcadia and Dade City. Doug Phillips, blueberry Extension coordinator for UF, said the tour evaluated two production systems.
“We visited a farm down in Arcadia for the morning stop on our Blueberry Breeding Farm Tour,” Phillips said. “We have a stage three and four trial location in Arcadia. Stage three is a littler earlier in the process and stage four is more advanced. We were able to look at some of the more promising selections in Arcadia and give growers more information on yields and taste test some of the fruit from those varieties. This trial gave us a chance to look at some the varieties that might be available to growers in the future.
“In Arcadia, all the varieties on display were in an evergreen system, which means we want to keep the leaves on them all year long, and they never go dormant. Everything down there is being selected for what would perform well in an evergreen system. There are a couple varieties from our 2017 lineup that have made it to stage four that look really promising for evergreen production from a yield and fruit quality standpoint.”
In Dade City, commercially available varieties and one that is still in development in stage four was on display.
“We planted plots of 500 bushes each in a machine harvest trial,” Phillips said. “Whether those are machine harvested this season as a two-year old plant or next year as a three-year old, we are still determining. It was a chance for growers to look at some really promising varieties. We looked at Sentinel, which is available and our newest blueberry release. It has performed well in central and north-central Florida. We have just recently planted it in South Florida, too, to see how it does down there. It puts on a lot of fruit. We’ve done consumer taste panels on it, and it has rated very high for taste.
“The stage four selection (variety number 11-51) we have been watching for a while and is looking good. It puts on a lot of fruit and has strong, dark-green foliage. This one has the potential to be released this year, so we are watching very closely to see how it does this season.”
