Abstract
In perennial fruit crops, bearing can be influenced by various factors, including environmental conditions, germplasm, rootstocks, and cultivation methods. Cherries, one of the most important and popular fruit species from the temperate climate zone, achieve high prices on the market. New agricultural technologies and environmental factors force a change in the approach to cherry cultivation. Old-type cherry orchards, with their high demand for water, nutrients, and manual work, are replaced by orchards of self-pollinating cherry cultivars grown on dwarf rootstocks. These changes make it necessary to search for ways to regulate fruiting, in particular to thin buds, flower, and fruit. In light of environmental regulations and consumer pressure, thinning methods are being sought that either do not involve the use of chemicals or that use eco-friendly chemical agents. This review examines recent progress in understanding the effect of thinning methods on the physiology, tree growth, and fruit quality of cherries; discusses horticultural practices aimed to ensure regular cropping and their influence on fruit quality; and provides suggestions for future research.
Highlights
Thinning is carried out regularly on stone fruit species such as peach and nectarine, but rarely on apricots, plums, sweet cherries, or sour cherries
This review examines recent progress in understanding the effect of thinning methods on the physiology, tree growth, and fruit quality of cherries; discusses horticultural practices aimed to ensure regular cropping and their influence on fruit quality; and provides suggestions for future research
This ratio influences the yield, fruit quality, and vigour of trees, but it has no effect on the whole canopy net CO2 exchange rate (NCER canopy), which indicates that it does not affect the intensity of photosynthesis
Summary
Thinning is carried out regularly on stone fruit species such as peach and nectarine, but rarely on apricots, plums, sweet cherries, or sour cherries. In order to obtain a good quality marketable crop, it is sufficient if only a few to about a dozen percent of flowers set fruit For this reason, apple trees yield well when 7% of flowers have set fruit. As manual thinning of cherries is very expensive due to the size of tree and number of fruit, it is necessary to develop a chemical thinning technology that would be especially suitable for the treatment of abundantly fruiting self-pollinating cultivars [9]. Thinning of flowers or fruit of cherries [12], apricot, European plum, or Japanese plum [9,13,14] to regulate the size and to increase the crop value is only relevant in years of high yield, that is, when the number of buds or fruit set is very high. For stone fruit species, it is advisable to use thinning of buds at a later stage so as to prevent excessively loaded branches from breaking [9,13,14]
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