to evaluate the effect of shoot girdling, fruit thinning, urea, sucrose and zinc on inflorescence bud retention in pistachio, an experiment comprised of 12 treatments including girdling, fruit thinning, application of urea (0.5%), and sucrose (3 and 5%) and their combination of the first two with urea plus zinc sulfate (0.05 and 0.1% of pure zinc) as well as a combination of the two with urea, ...

Chemical fruit thinning has become a popular practice in modern fruit orchards for achieving high quality fruits, reducing costs of hand thinning and promoting return bloom. However, most of the suggested chemical thinners are often concerned for their detrimental effects and environmental problems. 5-Aminolevulic acid (ALA) is a natural, nontoxic, biodegradable, and environment-friendly plant ...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS The distribution of canopy growth among different shoot types such as epicormic, long and short shoots is not well understood in the peach tree. In this experiment, the effects of crop load and early epicormic sprout removal on current and subsequent-year distribution of vegetative growth among epicormic, long and short shoots was investigated in Prunus persica. METHODS Fi...

In apple (Malus×domestica Borkh), as in many fruiting crops, fruit maintenance vs abscission is a major criteria for production profitability. Growers routinely make use of chemical thinning agents to control total fruit load. However, serious threats for the environment lead to the demand for new apple cultivars with self-thinning properties. In this project, we studied the genetic determinism...

Marked variations in the vitamin C content of different varieties of apples have been observed. The values of 21 Massachusetts-grown varieties were reported by Smith and Fellers,^ and the results of several other workers have been summarized by Batchelder.^ Between different lots of apples of the same variety small differences in vitamin C concentration have been found which appeared to result ...

Thinning of fruit trees is a commonly used technique for improving yield regularity and fruit quality. Since few effective chemical thinning agents are available, thinning is still mostly carried out through expensive manual labor. Thinning machines developed in recent years have demonstrated that automated thinning can be a viable alternative for the traditional methods and can yield economic ...