#FLORIGOLD GRAPEFRUIT SPOON REGISTRATION#

People taking some antidepressants and (especially damaging, given grapefruit’s geriatric constituency) cholesterol drugs were warned to lay off. Power drinks and Frappuccinos pushed aside fruit juice. The year-round supply of fruit that has come with globalization helped kill holiday fruit baskets, and everyone to whom they were once sent moved to Florida anyway, or so it seemed.įor single and working parents, it was time-consuming enough to pour juice from a carton, let alone to manicure grapefruit with those old-fashioned serrated spoons. And like other seeded citrus, they bear substantially only every other year. Phillippe’s original planting to the branches of sour orange trees in Dunedin, seven miles away, and the Duncan grapefruit was born.īecause Duncans are slower to mature (and sweeten), their season is shorter. Sixty years later, a onetime insurance man named A. But only in 1830 did Odet Phillippe - who claimed, probably spuriously, to have been Napoleon’s surgeon - bring grapefruit from Barbados or Jamaica or Cuba to Safety Harbor, near Tampa. But no Duncans sprout among the million citrus seedlings in Phil Rucks’s nursery in Frostproof, whose focus is on cultivating new, bug-resistant varieties rather than on salvaging historic ones.Ĭitrus came to Florida with the conquistadors.

#FLORIGOLD GRAPEFRUIT SPOON REGISTRATION#

Scattered survivors pop up in backyards, and specimens reside at the Citrus Research and Education Center in Lake Alfred and the State Bureau of Citrus Budwood Registration in Chiefland. Marty McKenna, a longtime grower in Lake Wales, can’t point you to a single tree. In his two decades in the business, Dave Nicely of Sun Harvest Citrus in Fort Myers said, he had never eaten one. Every February for 15 years, he had come to CeeBee’s and stuffed 12 bushels of Duncans - the maximum allowable under Florida fruit inspection laws - into his Lincoln Town Car.ĭuncans accounted for barely 1 percent of Florida’s grapefruit acreage last year, said Candi Erick of the State Agricultural Statistics Service, and even that sounds inflated. Though still less than three feet tall, those fledglings are good news for people like Raymond Hunter, 81, a retired theoretical nuclear physicist from Royston, Ga. One of the last Florida groves to sell Duncans until its old trees died a few years ago, CeeBee’s Citrus here in Odessa, 25 miles north of Tampa, recently planted 53 new ones, the largest such initiative in decades. As I learned in my own quest for the fruit, there are signs of resurrection as it makes an arduous transition from near extinction to reincarnation, as an heirloom.

Survivors include the Marsh, ruby red, star and other comparatively flavorless descendants piled high in supermarkets everywhere.īut the Duncan’s death could prove short-lived. The cause was inconvenience.Īs its devoted fans can attest, the classic white, seed-studded Duncan grapefruit, named for the grower who introduced it commercially in 1892, has become virtually impossible to find, completing one of the greatest disappearing acts in all of American agriculture. The seeded Florida grapefruit, long a staple of the American breakfast, has all but died at the age of 187 after an extended illness.

Florigold grapefruit spoon