Author Topic: Bloomsweet  (Read 11631 times)

AndrewAZ

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Bloomsweet
« on: February 22, 2017, 11:51:35 PM »
When I lived in Hampton, VA, zone 8a, I got the bug for cold hardy citrus.  With the helping of Gaylord in VA Beach, I was amassing a very nice colection.  I had changsha mandarine and a limequat in the ground.  I had keraji madarin, satsuma mandarin, bloomsweet, clem yuzu, Sanbokan lemon, ichang lemons in pots and was scoping for places to plant them in my yard.  If I could have found kishu mandarin in VA, I would have been a very happy camper.
Well, life did a turn around and after 7 years in VA, I left for AZ in 2012.  I had to leave all my citrust behind and start a new.  I was so invested in this point in cold hardy citrus, that I wanted to regrow all my favorite's out.  To my great sadness , I quickly found out only kishu mandarin and owari satsuma mandarin could be purchased in AZ.
So, over the past 5 years, I started a one man campaign to beg wherever I could to get or pay for the remaining trees through seeds.
One note is that I decided to leave out limequat and ichang lemon.
Well, I am happy to report that I am almost whole again.  With my clem yuzu and keraji recently sprouting, and from the past couple years, I know have the complete list.. ..except for bloomsweet.

So that leads me to a question, should I just up on bloomsweet?  Unlike all the other citrus I listed, I have never actually tried a bloomsweet.  Was growing it mostly for cold hardiness.
I have heard mixed reviews on the flavor of bloomsweet, with some saying it is insipid.  Also, I have seen some interesting grapefruit seeds on ebay for some sweet grapefruit and thought maybe I should just give them a try.
Any recommendations?

Millet

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Re: Bloomsweet
« Reply #1 on: February 23, 2017, 10:44:26 AM »
Here is what the booklet "Hardy Citrus For The Southeast" says about Bloomsweet grapefruit (know as Kinkoji in Japan).

Bloomsweet resembles a sour orange in its upright growth habit, but the large, yellow fruit looks just like a grapefruit, though with a thinner peel. The brightly colored fruit is easy to peel, much like a mandarin.  Inside the fruit is coarser and drier than grapefruit, but sweeter and with no bitterness.  It's probably a hybrid of the pummelo with something (or somethings) else.  Bloomsweet appears to be fully hardy to Zone 8a, enduring 14 F in Montezuma, Georgia with negligible leaf damage. 
Flavor: Sweet grapefruit, no off flavors, very good quality.
Uses: Dessert 

Ilya11

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Re: Bloomsweet
« Reply #2 on: February 23, 2017, 12:53:44 PM »
Yes, Kinkoji (Bloomsweet) is a hybrid of pomelo with tangor Kunenbo-A ( sweet orange - Kishu mandarin cross).

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0166969&type=printable
Best regards,
                       Ilya

AndrewAZ

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Re: Bloomsweet
« Reply #3 on: February 24, 2017, 10:53:59 PM »
Ok, maybe what I should be asking is, is it worth the struggle to find seeds for this apparently rare variety of a sweet grapefruit, or, are there other, more easily attainable sweet grapefruit hybrids out there that I should maybe consider.  If bloomsweet is the best of the bunch, then I will just keep looking.

mrtexas

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Re: Bloomsweet
« Reply #4 on: February 25, 2017, 12:01:25 AM »
Bloomsweet tastes just like any other white grapefruit. There are OK if
you like white grapefruit. What grapefruit do you like, pink, red or white?
If you like white grapefruit grow marsh as it has almost no seeds and
bloomsweet has abundant seeds. I grew duncan and had a bloomsweet
branch. My duncan near Houston,TX never got the great flavor that
Florida duncans do. Myself I prefer the orange colored golden grapefruit
available in the Houston,TX area. However golden seeds make a white grapefruit.
My personal favorite is the Florida pink. Reds are nice if you wait long enough
for them to get sweet like March. IMHO clem yuzu and keraji are not worth growing
as they aren't first quality in flavor or size. I've tasted all the "cold hardy" citrus and
although they may be cold hardy they aren't great tasting.

« Last Edit: February 25, 2017, 12:04:55 AM by mrtexas »

JJROSS54

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Re: Bloomsweet
« Reply #5 on: February 25, 2017, 07:27:08 AM »
Have you tried Oro Blanco?  They are easy to find here in AZ

AndrewAZ

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Re: Bloomsweet
« Reply #6 on: February 26, 2017, 12:16:09 AM »
I may just hold off for a while and try some different grapefruit carieties.  I had oro blanco once and it wasn't my favorite.  Might try some different pummelo's, too.
I have eaten a fair amount of keraji and I really like them.  I kind of agree on the clem yuzu.  Pretty sour.

Citradia

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Re: Bloomsweet
« Reply #7 on: February 26, 2017, 09:33:01 PM »
I tasted bloomsweet at one of the southeast citrus forums a few years ago, and it was sweet like an orange. I wouldn't even consider it a grapefruit. I just had to believe the seasoned growers at the dinner that it was a grapefruit. I tried to grow a bloomsweet on its own roots but my heat lamps kept busting that winter and it froze to death during one of the polar vortexes. If I lived somewhere warmer, I'd get a grafted one and grow it.

selkirk

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Re: Bloomsweet
« Reply #8 on: February 27, 2017, 09:34:57 PM »
Let me look for some bloomsweet seeds this weekend. I had a 22 deg.freeze and all my bloomsweet fruit froze and dropped to the ground. There was a ton of fruit on the ground a couple of weeks ago, I bet I can find a few seeds.

AndrewAZ

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Re: Bloomsweet
« Reply #9 on: February 28, 2017, 12:24:32 AM »
That would really make my day!!!

norahhosin

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Re: Bloomsweet
« Reply #10 on: February 28, 2017, 06:03:27 AM »
I've always wanted to try growing bloomsweets..

selkirk

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Re: Bloomsweet
« Reply #11 on: March 05, 2017, 06:58:43 PM »






AndrewAZ-found you some seeds!!!

Ilya11

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Re: Bloomsweet
« Reply #12 on: March 06, 2017, 04:43:10 AM »
Selkirk,
Fruits of your Bloomsweet look more  like mine:



http://tropicalfruitforum.com/index.php?topic=18992.25

Do you have many seeds inside?
Best regards,
                       Ilya

selkirk

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Re: Bloomsweet
« Reply #13 on: March 20, 2017, 07:51:24 PM »
Ilya-I looked at your post on your bloomsweet. Yours seems to be different from mine and other bloomsweet I have handled. Most of mine have a somewhat of a "teardrop" shape to them, color wise mine are very light colored, and mine have lots of seeds.

vlan1

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Re: Bloomsweet
« Reply #14 on: March 21, 2017, 09:48:48 AM »
Yeah as I said in the other post, I do not believe Ilya11's tree to be bloomsweet. The fruit are round not teardrop shaped and have orange colored flesh.

They are a dead ringer for a cocktail grapefuit (mandelo)  except they seem to be lacking seeds.

Not saying they are not a tasty fruit, I just don't believe these are true bloomsweet grapefruit.

SoCal2warm

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Origins of Kinkoji
« Reply #15 on: May 11, 2017, 05:36:09 PM »
In this post I hope to help cast some light on the mystery of what Bloomsweet actually is, which lineages of citrus exactly it came from.

Firstly, it is known that Bloomsweet was probably brought to Texas by immigrant citrus orchard growers from Japan. The Japanese variety it corresponds to appears almost certainly to be a variety named Kinkoji.
(I wonder if this could have anything to do with how the extremely rare Chorioactis geaster mushroom came to be naturalized in parts of Texas, but that's a very separate topic)

According to the following study, Kinkoji appears to be a direct hybrid between a Kunenbo and a pomelo-type citrus.

Hybrid Origins of Citrus Varieties Inferred from DNA Marker Analysis of Nuclear
and Organelle Genomes
, Shizuoka, Japan
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0166969&type=printable

The obvious question arises as to why then the Bloomsweet (Kinkoji) is so cold-hardy. Neither Kunenbo nor Japanese pomelo-type citrus is extremely cold tolerant. What is more likely, I think, is that the pomelo-type parent may itself actually have been a pomelo-yuzu hybrid.
 
Yuzu carries genes from a papeda ancestor, but this papeda ancestor is not exactly from the same direct lineage as the Ichang papeda. Likely this old ancestor has been lost.
It has been speculated that the Bloomsweet is a hybrid between pomelo and Ichang papeda, but I do not believe this theory is actually correct, or historically likely.
 
There exist several traditional citrus varieties in Japan that had a Yuzu parent. One of these is Sudachi, which is used more often than Yuzu in the Tokushima region of Japan. Despite what some sources seem to suggest, Sudachi originated in Japan and was not directly descended from C. Ichangsis (though it might not be entirely inaccurate to describe these fruits as having C. Ichangsis in their genetic lineage).

The reason Bloomsweet is so cold-hardy probably has to do with genes originating from papeda and passed down through yuzu, in combination with genes from mandarin (which does have more cold-hardiness than Orange, but still is not extremely cold-tolerant). The particular mandarin variety from which all Japanese mandarins descended is believed to be Kishu, which originally came from China.

The hypothesized yuzu-pomelo parent might have had cold-hardy yuzu genes but it also probably had genes from pomelo that made it vulnerable to cold. These genes would not get bred out until the next breeding cross. And a yuzu-pomelo hybrid would not have been very valuable for Japanese to propagate at that time. It would have been much less edible than a regular pomelo, but less useful than other yuzu-type citrus for flavoring food. It was probably just a novel citrus cross that was not preserved. Someone probably took seeds from it to see if anything more useful could come from it. And that was a cold-hardy pomelo-like fruit, the Kinkoji.

But here is something else I found. Hyuga-natsu is believed to be cross between pomelo and yuzu. (It's grown in the far South of Japan)
http://shun-gate.com/en/roots/roots_59.html
 
It's possible Bloomsweet may have come from Hyuga-natsu.
 
Both Kinkoji and Hyuga-natsu are self-incompatible varieties.
Self- and Cross-incompatibility of Various Citrus Accessions, Kagoshima University
 http://www.readcube.com/articles/10.2503/jjshs.75.372
 
That means that any seeds that were taken from a Hyuga-natsu would have been hybrids of some other citrus growing in the vicinity.
 
It also suggests anyone in a Northern climate trying to grow a Bloomsweet alone all by itself will have very poor to no fruit set if they don't also have another citrus variety. But I'm not too sure about this.

So here is my proposed ancestral lineage diagram for Bloomsweet:

...............papeda.............sour mandarin
...................l_______________l
................................l
..pomelo.................yuzu........sweet orange....kishu mandarin
.......l_____________l..................l___________l
..................l........................................l
..........Hyuganatsu (?)......................kunenbo
..................l_______________________l
......................................l
.................................Kinkoji
............................(Bloomsweet)

If this diagram is valid, that would put the ancestral composition of Bloomsweet at
43.75% mandarin, 12.5% sour mandarin
12.5% unknown papeda ancestor
and 31.25% pomelo ancestry, if we include the fact that sweet orange has 25% pomelo ancestry

I suspect that Bloomsweet's mitochondrial DNA (along the seed parent line) originated from pomelo.





« Last Edit: May 11, 2017, 05:57:34 PM by SoCal2warm »

Citradia

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Re: Bloomsweet
« Reply #16 on: May 11, 2017, 08:54:45 PM »
That's a very interesting break down of bloomsweet genealogy!

Ilya11

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Re: Origins of Kinkoji
« Reply #17 on: May 12, 2017, 03:39:27 AM »


According to the following study, Kinkoji appears to be a direct hybrid between a Kunenbo and a pomelo-type citrus.

Hybrid Origins of Citrus Varieties Inferred from DNA Marker Analysis of Nuclear
and Organelle Genomes
, Shizuoka, Japan
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0166969&type=printable

The obvious question arises as to why then the Bloomsweet (Kinkoji) is so cold-hardy. Neither Kunenbo nor Japanese pomelo-type citrus is extremely cold tolerant. What is more likely, I think, is that the pomelo-type parent may itself actually have been a pomelo-yuzu hybrid.


Amazingly, how easy you are discarding  a very solid experimental data from this article pointing to the absence of Yuzu involvement in the Kinkoji parentage.   
Best regards,
                       Ilya

Millet

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Re: Bloomsweet
« Reply #18 on: May 12, 2017, 11:36:22 AM »
Ilya!! on my seedling Sour Orange the first fruits started at about 5-ft. and eventually in future years moved from there up higher into the tree.  This would correspond to Dr. Manners node theory.

SoCal2warm

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Re: Bloomsweet
« Reply #19 on: May 14, 2017, 02:57:12 AM »
I also want to point out something interesting here, that could provide a potential explanation for the confusion.
Apparently there is known to exist a graft hybrid between Kinkoji and mandarin. The fruits of this hybrid (presumed chimera) are orange in color.
http://www.citrusvariety.ucr.edu/citrus/kinkoji_unshiu.html

It could be possible for some reason that the odd Bloomsweet propagation reverted to a graft hybrid, which would explain why it doesn't look right.
When you start hybridizing disparate citrus species together, that could end up making their cross more susceptible to becoming a graft chimera with the rootstock it was growing on. Just a thought.

In the picture, the vertical marking going down one of the fruits is a strong indication it could be a graft chimera (the line of cells in that marking is pure mandarin).

DFWCitrus

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Re: Bloomsweet
« Reply #20 on: May 14, 2017, 11:31:49 AM »
Grow what does best in Scottsdale. Satsumas are not fond of desert conditions and the leaves can get sunburned and scortched. Grapefruits, oranges, limes, lemons can thrive there and some tangerines and mandarins.

will2358

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Re: Bloomsweet
« Reply #21 on: June 27, 2019, 07:00:44 PM »
If anyone is still looking for Bloomsweet, Mckenzie Farm has it. They have lots of cold hardy citrus.
http://mckenzie-farms.com/photo.htm

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SoCal2warm

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Re: Bloomsweet
« Reply #22 on: June 27, 2019, 08:55:21 PM »
Ok, maybe what I should be asking is, is it worth the struggle to find seeds for this apparently rare variety of a sweet grapefruit,
In your zone 9b climate, Duncan grapefruit would probably grow just fine and would probably have better flavor and slightly better fruit quality.

I've never tasted Bloomsweet, but it's supposed to be somewhere in between an orange and a grapefruit or pomelo in flavor, but kind of bland, not exactly the most juicy, and seedy. Probably wouldn't compete with other commercial grapefruits if it was sold in markets.

However, it may be slightly hardier than Satsuma. My Bloomsweet survived and my Satsuma didn't. (both were covered)

will2358

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Re: Bloomsweet
« Reply #23 on: July 11, 2019, 08:32:47 PM »
This Mckenzie farm bloomsweet picture seems to show both shapes on 1 tree.


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Yorgos

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Re: Bloomsweet
« Reply #24 on: July 15, 2019, 11:24:49 AM »
While Bloomsweet are not the best grapefruit, they are a tasty citrus, although seedy.  Flavor is pretty good and they are easy to peel. A big advantage to any fruit.  They exhibit alternate bearing behavior.  Also mine have a slight pear shape to them. They wont color up til November and be at their best in March or even later.



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