California breeder keeps perfecting peaches, plums

[kleenex]

The Associated Press: California breeder keeps perfecting peaches, plums

From link:

The painstaking process has paid off, with a hybrid plum-apricot he trademarked as the Pluot, and in Zaiger's international reputation as a premiere developer of stone fruit, which are named for their hard pits.

Despite his age, Zaiger cruises the grove in a golf cart, working on new varieties that will be ready for market in several years.

"The Pluot was game-changing in my mind," said Tom Gradziel, a pomologist at the University of California, Davis. "The plumcot cross-existed, but he saw potential in the plum's sweetness and the apricot's aromatics and crossed it back with the parent tree many times to bring out those characteristics — sweet but no bitter skin."

Zaiger developed interspecies varieties like the aprium (part apricot and part plum), the peacotum (a hybrid of peach, apricot and plum) and the cherub (a cross between a cherry and a plum).

UMMMMM peacotum......