[3] This area along the Pacific coast in the King Range has wet winters and hot summers, and Etter later attributed his success partly to his choice of location.
He left him with the advice "Have confidence In yourself and look out for people with schemes to help you.” Etter became known for his insistence on the value of using unimproved parent material, often taken from wild strains, and he frequently made 'wide' crosses between widely divergent genetic types.
[14] By 1910, Ettersburg 121 had become the leading variety in the Willamette Valley, Oregon, because its firm flesh, high color, and strong flavor meant that it canned well.
Etter had made a study of the soul and vital essence of the American shortcake for twenty-six years and had produced so many varieties the writer can't believe his own notes on the subject.
[31] In the late 1920s, Etter shifted his attention to apple breeding, using scion wood gleaned from a number of sources including the University of California.
Some eastern and midwestern breeders, including Liberty Hyde Bailey and Charles Downing had already made some experiments with Surprise and been unhappy with the results, but Etter found that it worked better as part of a west-coast breeding program.
[32] By 1928, Etter was far enough along in his breeding experiments to publish a preliminary report in the Pacific Rural Press, where he wrote about two of his pink-fleshed cultivars, the Redflesh Winter Banana and a nameless seedling that, by its description, might have been Pink Pearl.
Subsequently, the midwestern breeder Niels Ebbesen Hansen worked on breeding red-fleshed apples and crabapples, expressing disappointment when he found that Etter had beaten him to the punch.
Although not all of Etter's Surprise descendants were successful, the best of them shared a pronounced aromatic quality that appears to be linked to the anthocyanin pigmentation that gives the flesh its distinctive pinkish and reddish tones.
The California Nursery Company introduced six Etter varieties in its 1944 catalog – Pink Pearl and five apples with regular non-pigmented flesh (Alaska, All Gold, Humboldt Crab, Jonwin, and Wickson).
Recipes were by Robert Stoney Mayock who was a winemaker (Los Amigos Vineyards in Irvington), amateur chef, gourmet, and food columnist.
[44] His research showed that some of the large white clovers from southern Europe were suitable for Humboldt County dairy farmers to use for forage because they put on a great deal of growth during the winter.
Fishman ultimately located about half of Etter's pink-fleshed varieties in the test orchard and in nearby areas, and in 1983 he founded the Greenmantle Nursery[45] to make seven of them available to the public.