Welcome to pombazaar

[pombazaar]

Welcome to the site! This forum was created after I read through a thread on ourfigs.com that asked if anyone knows of a pomegranate forum. To my surprise not a single dedicated pomegranate forum existed anywhere online...until now! Through a little bit of offline discussion, we decided that it would be of value to open a forum to encourage pomegranate growers around the world to collaborate with each other.

The original thread on ourfigs can be found here: https://www.ourfigs.com/forum/blueberry ... nate-forum

Enjoy your stay and grow lots of pomegranates

[alanmercieca]

Well this is great, I remember back in the days of the 'figs 4 fun' forum. There was a little discussion about when people's past relatives used to bring fig trees to America with them from their home coutry, a lot of them also brought pomegranate bushes back with them. I was considering starting a forum just for them, yet I was not sure that such a forum would do well, not enough demand, a lot of fig collectors are not interested in them. There are over 1,000 Pomegranate varieties out there, yet not all of them are worth growing/or worth growing in some climates. I hope that it works out. I can see that this forum is very new, it's doing good so far.

I think that a lot of people are turned off by the seeds, yet as I have proven on here that it's actually easy to juice them, if you are willing to invest some money. I love pomegranates, yet I too hate the seeds, and a majority of pomegranates do not have pleasant to eat seeds. Also people who grow figs are used to getting fruit from a plant very fast, that does not happen with a lot of pomegranate varieties.

[greenfig]

Alan, I bet you never tried a nicely ripe Desertnyi or Angel Red, the seeds are barely noticeable and very edible

[alanmercieca]

Nope I never tried them, yet I knew for a while now that there are some very few varieties like that. Not really enough to keep a forum going all by themselves though.

[greenfig]

I think they have a list
http://fruitandnuteducation.ucdavis.edu ... nate_soft/

[alanmercieca]

Awesome yet not all soft seeded pomegranates are very soft, or very soft and very small seeded. Also different people have different opinions, like to me very soft would be unpleasant yet easy to digest, and what you are thinking of as very soft is what some people would call seedless or boneless as they used to call it. I am sure one day that things will be way less confusing, when more people try the softest seeded varieties.

As I am looking at those photos it's obvious that some of the varieties have medium or large seeds.

Soft seeded should be broken down more, like the softest should be called something like 'melt in your mouth', could not get more obvious than that.

[bopcrane]

Soft seeded should be broken down more, like the softest should be called something like 'melt in your mouth', could not get more obvious than that.

I kind of agree on this, I think in our cultivar descriptions it would be useful to have some sort of scale to rate the hardness of the seed from very hard to very soft or seedless or at least we should have clear and consistent verbiage on seed hardness. I know it can be a little bit subjective but obviously we have a need to differentiate from the "practically non-existent seed" and "soft enough to chew OK" and maybe seed size too

Maybe some kind of letter grade scale, like with 'A' meaning "seedless/melt in your mouth", and "F" meaning you'll break your teeth on it, I'm really not sure

would like to know how others feel on this, how specific should we get on this and what language should we use etc?

[alanmercieca]

There is tons of confusion on seed hardness, also different experts have degreed on the seed hardness of the Maltese varieties in Malta, One variety for example one expert said is 'slightly soft', another expert said 'very tender seeds'. So yes we need some standard system, I love the letter scale idea, as long as each letter has a good not confusing index showing what it means.