Cherimoyas/Atemoyas are one of my favorite fruit with their extremely sweet and fragrant velvety white flesh that has the perfect balance of pineapple like acidity to balance out the high sugar content. When I first saw a Cherimoya, it looked very alien to me and I had no clue about the deliciousness that hid beneath the green alien skin. Thankfully, my first taste of Cherimoya was from my friend who offered me a fruit from a tree his dad grew in their backyard and it was an excellent variety. He told me to wait a few days to let it ripen, which I did, and after one taste I was hooked for life. This was about thirty years ago.
I’ve been growing Cherimoyas ever since and recently began thinking about trying my hand at breeding Cherimoyas, maybe crossing them with Atemoyas.
Cherimoyas are so friggin delicious but also crazy expensive. I’ve watched the price of Cherimoyas slowly climb each year and good quality fruit are now going for around $7-12 per pound with about $8-10 a pound being average in my area. One of the reasons Cherimoyas( Atemoyas to a lesser extent) are so expensive is because many of the varieties need hand pollination in order to set reliable and nicely shaped crops.
Recently, while pondering the possibility of crossing a Lemon Zest Mango with a DOT Mango, I thought to myself what a pain in the ass it is to cross Mangos. With huge bloom panicles on Mangos and with pollinating insects busily collecting nectar and thus potentially contaminating virgin female flowers, I would have to emasculate hermie flowers, remove male flowers and bag virgin females in order to procure my starting material. At that moment, I thought to myself, the disadvantage of requiring hand pollination with Cherimoyas can be an advantage when it comes to breeding Cherimoyas.
Several years ago, Leo Manuel offered me a fruit from a Cherimoya x Atemoya cross. He simply called it #3 and it was easily one of the best Cherimoya like fruit I have ever tasted. The Fruit had a very sweet Rasberry like acidity, very reminiscent of the acidity from a regular Cherimoya but you can taste the tiny bit of Atemoya in there as well. The best thing about Leo’s Fruit was that he gets fruit without hand pollination.
I’ve grown Cherimoyas from random seeds before and one of my seedlings produced awesome fruit. Unlike many other types of fruit( besides clones/polyembryonic) I’ve heard from others that they also got great tasting fruit from seedlings. This leads me to believe that the major traits that we( us Fruit snobs) are looking for such as good size, sweet taste and good acid balance are concentrated in a narrow gene pool which may indicate that breeding Cherimoyas and Annona hybrids may be worth the effort.
I began a short search and immediately found this article that talks about mapping the genetic diversity of Cherimoyas
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3253804/I also came upon this more interesting article regarding breeding strategies for Atemoyas and Cherimoyas which touches upon creating seedless fruit through utilization of polyploids to create seedless triploid, which I theorized in another thread, which was based on the process of creating seedless watermelons.
https://www.actahort.org/books/497/497_13.htm Anyways, to make a long story longer, I am seriously contemplating some future breeding projects to focus on creating an excellent tasting fruit with lower seed count, high sugar, high acid and most importantly self pollinating. Leo Manuel already created something to this extent but I’m not going to settle and I’m thinking about crossing Leo’s hybrid #3 with Dr. white, Pierce, El Bumpo or Orton. Maybe all 3?
Anybody have any good articles, suggestions or reasons why I shouldn’t do it? Thanks in advance for any comments.
Simon
Edited to correct tetraploid to triploid
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