可保鲜一年的“宇宙脆”苹果上市

They call it the Cosmic Crisp. It’s not a video game but a new variety of apple.

Growers in Washington State in the United States have planted 12 million Cosmic Crisp apple trees, a sign of confidence in the new variety. While only 450,000 18-kilogram boxes will be available for sale this year, that will jump to more than 2 million boxes in 2020 and more than 21 million by 2026.

The apple variety was developed by Washington State University. It is called Cosmic Crisp because of the bright yellowish dots on its skin, which look like stars.

“I’ve never seen an apple prettier in the orchard than these things are,” said Aaron Clark, vice president of Price Cold Storage. His family owns several orchards in central Washington and has planted 32 hectares of Cosmic Crisps.

The new variety keeps for a year in the refrigerator, said Kate Evans, who runs the breeding program at Washington State University. “It’s ultra-crisp, very juicy and has a good balance of sweetness and tartness*,” she said.

Cosmic Crisp is a hybrid of the disease-resistant Enterprise apples and the popular, crunchy Honeycrisp varieties.

Apples are grown in the arid* valleys and brown hillsides of central Washington, a few hours east of Seattle, and watered by irrigation projects. The state has around 1,500 apple growers and 70,820 hectares of orchards. About 50,000 people pick some 12 billion apples by hand each fall. The fruit is exported to 60 countries and regions.

With so much success, why was a new apple variety needed?

“A new apple brings excitement,” said Toni Lynn Adams, spokeswoman for the Washington Apple Commission, which markets apples internationally. “A new variety can reinvigorate* a market and industry.”

Scientists at Washington State University’s Tree Fruit Research Center spent 20 years breeding the desired apple tree seeds. The trees take three years to produce a crop.

The process of hybridization* has been used to breed plants for hundreds of years and is quite different from the genetic modification* methods.(SD-Agencies)