Home > News & Media > Market Watch: Hemet's wealth of summer grapefruit

Market Watch: Hemet's wealth of summer grapefruit

LA Times – May 20, 2011

At the farthest fringe of the Inland Empire, southeast of the hardscrabble town of Hemet, lies the world center of summer grapefruit, one of the least known and most fascinating of California’s agricultural niches. The major commercial grapefruit districts, Florida, Texas and California’s Coachella low desert, harvest from November to April, but Hemet’s peculiar high desert microclimate — hot enough in the day to color and sweeten the fruit but cool enough at night to delay maturity — provides a rare source of high-quality grapefruit in late spring and summer.

The dean of local grapefruit growers is David G. Kelley, 82, whose grandfather traded real estate along Wilshire Boulevard in Santa Monica a century ago for a citrus ranch in Corona. By one family account, when the first traffic light came to Corona, this grandfather decided the town was getting too busy and bought property in Hemet, then so remote that there were no paved roads or telephones. In 1935, he established his first grove of Marsh grapefruit, the traditional white-fleshed variety.

In the late 1940s, when David Kelley returned from military service and joined the family business, he started planting pink-fleshed Ruby varieties, developed from natural mutations in Texas and Florida. In the 1980s he began putting in new “super-red” varieties, Star Ruby, Rio Red and Flame.

Today the Kelley family grows 220 acres of citrus, mostly grapefruit, along with some late-season navel orange varieties, all farmed by David Kelley’s son, Ken, 52. The flatlands on their properties are a lush sea of grapefruit trees, with the golden and pink fruits mostly hidden in the dense green foliage. To make use of the steep hillsides, Ken planted on a dwarfing rootstock, Flying Dragon trifoliate, which yields trees just 6 feet tall, short enough to harvest by hand.

First to ripen, and at its peak right now, is Star Ruby, the most deeply colored and arguably the best of the reds. Firm, juicy, with rich, fruity flavor and few seeds, it is the standard of quality among red grapefruit; in Texas, where it was introduced, and in Florida too, it is not all that extensively grown, because of problems such as erratic bearing and sensitivity to herbicides, but it flourishes in Hemet.

Click here to view the full article online