I have Parfianka in a pot, but the only pom I have in the ground so far is Azadi. I’ll graft the Parfianka onto the Azadi this winter, but for now all I can offer is a little info on my experience with the Azadi.
I started the Azadi from a cutting in January 2018, put it in the ground last year, and this year it put on about 16 fruit. Seems precocious to me; I didn’t expect that at all! I live in the South Bay area of Los Angeles, several miles from the coast as the crow flies. Flowers budded in May and pollenated around mid-June. By July 19th it had set all of its fruit: 16 of them.
Early on, the fruit were a deep apple green with a bright red blush (on the sunny side of the fruit). In September the skins started shifting in color. The greens & reds both started yellow-ing.
I picked the first fruit on October 1st because the skin was so sunburned on the top that the skin’s surface was dark brown (it looked sunburned) and starting to crack. It tasted “pleasant”. Not nearly as tart as what has become our American standard (Wonderful). The first one to crack from ripening was on October 29th. It was noticeably better. Since then I’ve picked another couple when they cracked, and they have had more developed color in the arils, and more depth of flavor.
The arils are a mix of pink and colorless – often mixed in one aril. If you look at an aril as being shaped like a kernel of corn, the pointed end is often colorless, and the rounded end is usually pink.
The fruit weigh about 320 grams on average. I’m maintaining the bush at 6 feet. I’ve been told it would top out at about 15 feet if I let it go.
So far none of the animals or birds have bothered the fruit (wish I could say the same about my figs!). As of November 5th, it still has 12 poms hanging on it, and I want to see how late I can let a few of them go, so I can see how much more their flavor and sweetness develop.
UCANR’s PDF at
https://ucanr.edu/sites/Pomegranates/files/164443.pdf describes Azadi as “Very sweet, medium sized fruit. Name means ‘freedom’ in Persian. Peach colored gold fruit. Light pink sweet soft seeds with a little pleasant astringency.” It was also one of the 7 top favorites in the 2004-2005 tastings at Davis and then CRFG in San Diego. To be included in the CRFG tasting, it had to already be a top selection at the earlier Davis event (i.e., one of the top 8 out of 39).
But after all the hype I’ve heard about “soft” or “chewable” seeds in the pomegranates from the Turkmenistan collection, I was expecting a literal, “Nothing-to-spit-out” experience, and I didn’t get that. I cannot chew these seeds. They aren’t rock hard, but they aren’t edible either. And I’m spitting out a significant wad of seeds after sucking all the juice away, so I wouldn’t say that the seeds are exactly small, either. They may be a smaller portion of the total than Wonderful, but I’m not interested in doing that experiment. I doubt that any of the varieties with great flavor also deliver in the “nearly seedless” department.
Here's a fruit I picked on October 29th:
In the UCANR PDF above, one of the notes about Azadi says “it is reputed to be pest resistant.” That’s worth something. I’ve heard people talk about “leaf-footed bugs” that attack their poms. I haven’t had that problem yet. Maybe I won’t!
The UCANR PDF describes Azadis as “peach-colored and delicate as a flower.” Well my Azadi shrub is just beginning to bear fruit, and I haven’t yet found one that has made it all the way to peach-colored. So there’s quite a bit of road ahead.
I haven’t weighed the pomegranate’s components yet into seeds, skin and pulp. When I do, I’ll try to follow up with that information here.
