‘Honeycrisp’ apple fruit nutrient concentration affected by apple rootstocks

‘Honeycrisp’ apples are susceptible to mineral nutrient-related fruit disorders, such as bitter pit.
We utilized a well-established apple rootstock field trial in the Champlain Valley, NY, USA with 40 rootstocks (including B.9, M.9 and G.41 as controls) to determine the effects of rootstock genotypes on mineral nutrient concentrations in mature leaves and immature fruit.
Positive relationships were found for calcium, magnesium, zinc, and manganese in both leaves and fruit, suggesting that rootstocks conferring higher values in one also have positive effects on the rest, perhaps fueled by physiological commonalities for uptake and translocation. ‘Honeycrisp’ fruit calcium values were positively correlated with sulfur concentration.
Rootstocks that promoted higher zinc in leaves seemed to have less fruit calcium in general, while fruit zinc was positively correlated with fruit calcium.
Certain rootstocks (CG.6976, CG.4002, CG.4814, G.16, G.214 and M.7) enabled ‘Honeycrisp’ to achieve significantly higher levels of Ca in both leaves and fruit in this trial.
M.9 was very poor for fruit calcium while G.41 (CG. 3041) was closer to median values.
Our data indicate that it may be possible to breed apple rootstocks to deliver unique nutrient profiles to grafted scions.

XI International Symposium on Integrating Canopy, Rootstock and Environmental Physiology in Orchard Systems

G. Fazio, J. Lordan, P. Francescatto, L. Cheng, A. Wallis, M.A. Grusak, T.L. Robinson

fire blight, suckering, replant disease, yield efficiency

https://doi.org/10.17660/ActaHortic.2018.1228.33