CARUSO, Tiziano, DI MICELI, Claudia, MARRA, Francesco Paolo, DeJong, T, Di Vaio, C, Guarino, F, Musso, O, Reginato, GH, Caruso, T, DeJong, T, Di Miceli, C, Di Vaio, C, Guarino, F, Marra, FP, Musso, O, and Reginato, GH
In peach industry, due to the increasing cost of the land, energy and salaries, in the last thirty years have been developed horticultural strategies to increase the productivity of the orchards and to reduce the employment of hand workers. In areas in which large part of the days are brilliant, clean sky, with high levels of light intensity, and relative humidity is low, as those with a Mediterranean climate, to reach the above mentioned goal have been developed planting systems based on high tree densities and new tree shapes. In Southern Italy, technicians have been particularly active in performing new tree canopy architectures and growers showed to be very sensitive to these innovations as evidenced from the replacement of the traditional open vase with “inclined double walls” systems Y, V and Tatura trellis. These new planting systems, respect to those based on the “open vase“ allowed to obtain higher yield together with a larger amount of top quality fruits and this as consequence of the increased amount of light intercepted and more uniformly distributed within the tree. In this last decade, the increasing costs of the trellis components (iron wires and poles) to build up the trellis and the costs of the trees, due to the royalties protecting the new released cultivars, became the major limits of this super-intensive planting systems. For this reasons, despite the high efficiency of the workers in practicing the manual techniques (fruit thinning, harvest and pruning) the “inclined double walls” started to be abandoned and technicians and growers start to move to the catalan vase. This new system has been develop recently in Spain, being a new tree shape, a dwarfed vase named catalano, that complies relative high density with low cost for orchard planting and management. This training system, to control vegetative excessive growth , is based on several treatments of topping, some of them, particularly during the summer season, are performed mechanically. Preliminary observations carried out in Sibari, seem to confirm that the vasetto catalano - even managed without treatments with paclobutrazol, a growth retardant, as used in Spain, - could represent a valid planting system to produce both fruit for the fresh and for the processed (fresh cut, sliced fruits) fruits market. In greenhouse production, where precocious and high yield are the required conditions to have early return, planting systems have to be based on tree shapes that fit with high densities, as Y and V, currently the only one able to provide fruit of optimal quality for out-of-season peaches market. In California, although a certain agronomic success has been obtained by the KAC V, the “inclined double wall “systems were unsuccessful. Other shapes as “Quad V” and “Hex-V” , that are a sort of compromise between the perpendicular “V” system and the traditional open vase, have been developed in order to address some of the vigor issue inherent in the two scaffold perpendicular system as well as to reduce planting densities and orchard establishment cost. Scientist and field technicians are still searching for the molecule for fruit thinning and to build up the right machine for harvesting trees trained to open vase. Unfortunately, so far, only summer pruning mechanization has been developed. In Chile most of the information necessary to develop the important advances of fruit industry occurred in the last 25 years have been introduced or adapted from abroad. Peach orchards have been steadily intensified, predominantly using denser orchards with refined form of the open vase system, with the perpendicular V or three arm trees currently being the most common system. Generally, tree size reduction has been one of the main objective of breeders by searching for compact and brachitic vegetative habitus and for dwarfing rootstocks but no satisfactory genotypes has been selected yet and this last still remain a potential tool for high density planting systems. The researches on the use of chemical agents able to control vegetative growth were abandoned in many Countries because the environmentalist movements hardly contrasted such kind of solution. However, rational irrigation, mineral nutrition and soil management (controlled water stress, fertirrigation according to phenologic tree phase and real absorption, cover crops) could contribute to improve planting systems, controlling the vigor trees in orchard.