Michigan fruit group focuses on innovation at field day
The very first stop was Kober Fruit, where grower Randy Kober walked the group through a block of Honeycrisp on Nic.29 rootstock. The bench-grafted trees were planted in-place in 2018 in virgin soil where beans were the previous crop. Kober cut the scions off regular Honeycrisp trees from a various block. They installed the trellis and poles right after planting the trees.
“You need to have something to train that tree from the ground up if you do this,” he stated. “You need to be able to attach it.”
It’s still too early to state if the plant-in-place method will be cost-effective for Kober. He’s waiting to see how the block turns out prior to attempting the same method again. A few of the bench grafts didn’t take and needed chip budding, which slowed down growth in those trees, he said.
Kober didn’t irrigate the block. The summertime of 2018 was extremely dry, and watering and fertilization probably would have pushed the trees more that year, he stated. He fertilized them with nitrogen in 2019 and 2020.
If he were to try plant-in-place again, Kober would most likely check out finding a greenhouse to start the trees, so he would understand what the take was before planting them in his ground. That would prevent the inconsistent tree sizes he wound up with.
“You get a huge variation of trees doing a plant-in-place,” he said.
When the trees start striking the leading wire and he begins cropping them, Kober thinks the sizes will level out.
Breaking branches
The last stop was Expense Nyblad’s New Leaf Orchards, where he strolled the trip through a block of Fujis on Nic.29, planted in 2018. Specific branches in the block had dead, brown leaves that looked like fire blight however were not. Nyblad and his crew intentionally broke them to slow down their growth.
He understood from his sibling, Gunnar, who had been exploring with hedge cutting and other strategies in a test plot. Nyblad started fine-tuning the breaking technique.
The point is to decrease the branches’ strong growth prior to they start producing fruit spurs.
In spring of third leaf, Nyblad and his team break the powerful, upright growing branches that require to be cut off either that year or the next. The branches will either make it through the break and recover, at a flat branch angle, or gradually pass away, which will slow the regrowth behind the break– creating a smaller, calmer and more productive branch.
The perfect timing for breaking is first green idea, but the weather condition has to be warm enough for the branch to heal. The weather condition was too cold at green idea this year, so Nyblad waited longer than he would have chosen to begin breaking. He stated he and his team effectively broke anywhere from half to 70 percent of the branches. Success depended on who was doing the breaking.
“You have to train your males well,” Nyblad said. “It’s an extremely technical break. If you break it excessive, it will flex down too far. If you break it perfect, you can tip down every limb that you don’t wish to be vertical.”
— by Matt Milkovich