Area fruit breeder has devoted his life to perfecting varieties

By John Holland
jholland@modbee.com

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Admirers of Floyd Zaiger's work in fruit breeding often visit to taste the latest from his test plots west of Modesto.

Supermarket produce managers recently came from Texas, fruit growers from Spain. A few years back, Martha Stewart sent a TV crew to film a segment.

Zaiger, 83, has earned worldwide fame for breeding plums, peaches and other stone fruit, most notably a plum-apricot cross he named the pluot.

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Yet the sweetest praise of all may have come from a 2-year-old grandnephew who faced a choice between a cookie and a pluot variety called Flavor Grenade.

"He stood there and ate two Flavor Grenades while he still had the part-eaten cookie in his hand," Zaiger recalled during an interview earlier this month at his 80-acre farm off Grimes Avenue.

His work since the 1950s is chronicled in a new book, "The Perfect Fruit: Good Breeding, Bad Seeds and the Hunt for the Elusive Pluot." Author Chip Brantley blends Zaiger's biography into a larger account of the summer fruit industry in the Southern San Joaquin Valley — fresh peaches, nectarines and plums grown mainly in the Fresno-Visalia area. (The canned fruit industry around Modesto gets no mention.)

The fresh business has struggled in the past couple of decades, as consumers turned away from fruit that had been bred mainly for size, color and shipping durability rather than flavor. Zaiger and other breeders looked for ways to put the flavor back by crossbreeding varieties with the right mix of traits.

The process seems simple enough. When fruit trees bloom in spring, breeders extract pollen from one variety and brush it onto the blossom of another, fertilizing a fruit that they hope will have the best qualities of its parents. They harvest the fruit from this cross, plant the pit and nurture a new seedling. Young branches from a promising variety are then grafted onto established trees, known as rootstock, that have their own desired traits.

Breeders are after more than flavor. They might aim for a variety that resists disease or suits a certain climate, or one that ripens early or late in the summer.

Such work can take 10 to 15 years to bear fruit of the sort you seek.

"Floyd knew that fruit breeding was an old man's game whose progress was best measured on a long clock," Brantley writes. "It was a trade best not dabbled in, something you had to treat like a calling. ... A few years would go by as a breeder made selections from his crosses. And then another few would go by as he evaluated the selections."

Nobody would try to breed fruit, Brantley concludes, "unless it was on somebody else's dime."

Zaiger did his early work on fruit during off hours from the successful azalea breeding business he started in the 1950s. It evolved into a small chain of retail garden centers in the Modesto area.

The Nebraska native had earned a degree in plant pathology from the University of California at Davis. He apprenticed in Le Grand with Fred Anderson, known as the "father of the modern nectarine." Anderson in turn was a protégé of Luther Burbank, the inventor of the Santa Rosa plum, the Shasta daisy and many other varieties.

Zaiger said it was Anderson who infected him with "the dreaded disease" of stone fruit breeding.

He also enjoyed the support of his wife, Betty Zaiger. He recalled telling her that it would likely take a dozen years to get their first royalty on a new fruit variety.

"That was the longest 12 years of her life," he said. "The 12th year, we got a check for $200."