22 December 2021
The much-anticipated wait for new day neutral strawberry varieties is almost over as UCD Royal Royce, UCD Valiant and UCD Moxie are being planted on grower farms in 2022.These 3 new day neutral strawberry varieties are from the University of California, Davis, the world-renowned strawberry breeding program. They are proudly licensed in many parts of the world by International Master License holder, Global Plant Genetics Ltd.
UCD Royal Royce has impressed very much in trials in California and beyond, producing large, well flavoured, visually appealing fruit with a good sugar / acid balance and excellent shelf life.
The yields per plant have been impressive in UC Davis trials as has the 10 % increase in berry size over San Andreas and percentage of marketable fruit.
The plants produce very large crowns but interestingly, very few runners in the fruiting field. This is a huge advantage to fruit growers in terms of costs savings and better utilisation of labour.
UCD Moxie has terrific levels of disease resistance, producing large volumes of strawberries later in the season. The plants in the fruiting field once again only produce a small amount of runners, delivering a cost saving to growers.
The disease resistance offered by UCD Moxie will be welcome to many growers where soils are becoming tired of strawberry production and in locations where the opportunities for soil sterilisation are being reduced.
Yields, fruit size and percentage of marketable fruit are again an improvement over controls varieties too.
Day neutral strawberry variety UCD Valiant has excellent early season production and impressive yield increases over the commercial control varieties throughout the remainder of the season.
The plants produce very large crowns with good levels of disease resistance. The early impression it will be a winner in organic production too.
Trials on fruit firmness proved it to be 28% firmer than Monterey, outstanding for export growers.Yield production of UCD Valiant and fruit size comparisons can be seen in the table below.
Once again, they demonstrate a giant leap forward for day neutral strawberry growers.
The significant improvements these 3 new generation day neutral strawberry varieties offer will be transformational to growers internationally.
Propagation licenses have been signed with carefully selected world class nurseries throughout Latin America, Europe, Turkey, Africa, The Middle East and Australia. A full list of these can be seen on the Global Plant Genetics website www.globalplantgenetics.com
