The Lindcove Fruit Display and Tasting event last weekend was a big hit both with the growers and the general public.  If you missed it, mark your calendar for Dec 13 (growers) and Dec 14 (homeowners) for 2013.  We had over 100 varieties of citrus to taste and enjoy plus many educational moments with Lindcove staff, Cooperative Extension Advisors, UC Master Gardeners, and Faculty from UC Riverside. 

Early season navel oranges command high prices in the export market, and Fukumoto navels are a prized commodity in the San Joaquin Valley.  The Fukumoto harvest generally follows the satsuma and clementine harvests, although this variety of navel hangs well on the tree into February.  Fukumotos have a characteristic deep orange color, superb flavor, and smooth texture, which earns them a top spot in early season exports.  Dr. Mikeal Roose (UC Riverside) is studying the yield, canopy size, and fruit quality of Fukumotos on various  the rootstocks.  The technician shown in the lower picture is using a digital caliper to measure rind thickness.  The caliper is connected to a computer with Microsoft Excel and the push of a button records the value and moves the cursor to the next cell in the spreadsheet.

This week the packline grader is getting a test run and color check to ensure "what you see is what you get" on the packline output.  Five projects are scheduled to use the packline grader between now and the end of the year, with an estimated 458 packline runs.  For research purposes, a packline run is all the fruit from one tree run together as one lot.  Data from the each tree lot can be analyzed separately.  In this photo Senior Agricultural Technician Jose Hernandez places Fukumoto navel oranges by hand onto the grader line, the fruit then passes through the grader, and each piece of fruit is retrieved at the other end to be scrutinized for how well the grader recorded the actual colors on each piece.  The grader takes 30 pictures of each piece of fruit as it rotates along the belt, and the data output reports each of ten colors as a percentage of the total.

Mid-autumn in the San Joaquin Valley indicates the beginning of the olive harvest.  Lindcove is primarily known for it's citrus blocks, but has a small planting of Manzanillo and Sevillano olive trees.  Olives are generally alternate bearing, and Dr. Carol Lovatt (UC Riverside) and Dr. Elizabeth Fichtner (Tulare County Farm Advisor) have been experimenting with plant growth regulators to improve flowering for the off years, in efforts to improve crop yields.  At harvest, fruit from each tree is picked into individual bins and weighed.