PROTECTED PEACH CULTURE IN SICILY. SIX YEARS OF RESEARCH ON TRAINING SYSTEMS AND PRUNING METHODS.

The growing demand for extra precocious fruit imported in Italy from the warmer countries and from the Australian hemisphere, has stimulated the actualization of research on protected peach cultivation resulting in ripening times of 30-40 days earlier in respect to the open field.
With the goal of obtaining qualitative and quantitative improvements in production, specific research has been conducted in Sicily on training and pruning methods (meadow-orchard, biennial crown, poliennial crown) on six cultivars (4 peaches and 2 nectarines), planted in 1980 in 1.40 × 0.90 m plots (7,936 trees/hectare) using meadow-orchard raising until 1983.

The cultivars from Florida (Maravilha, San Pedro and Sunred) have responded positively to the three training systems, but the best results were obtained in the plants trained using poliennial crown.
On the contrary, the cultivars from California (Armay, Armking and Springtime) responded differently to the three training systems, except for Armking which demonstrated adaptability to all of them.
For all of the cultivars, the poliennial crown training system has supplied optimum results, while the biennial crown was the less adaptable.

In each case, the better cultivars were: Maravilha (white peach ripening in the greenhouse at the end of April); San Pedro (yellow nectarine ripening during the first half of May). The attractive fruits produced have been well received by the Italian consumers.

Peach, XXIII IHC

E. Bellini, D. Falqui, O. Musso

https://doi.org/10.17660/ActaHortic.1992.315.6