THE IRTA-HORTRESEARCH APPLE SCION BREEDING PROGRAMME: AIMING FOR HIGH FRUIT QUALITY UNDER WARM GROWING CONDITIONS

A joint IRTA-HortResearch apple scion breeding programme was started in 2002 to create new cultivars well-suited to warm growing climatic conditions.
The general breeding aim is to develop these new cultivars with a number of outstanding agronomic traits and that produce high quality and tasteful apples with crisp, juicy and firm flesh textures and long storage and shelf life.
The preference is for red skin colour cultivars that cover the whole maturity season, while yellow skin is also a target for mid–season cultivars.
This programme is public and commercially supported.
Populations have been raised mainly from HortResearch breeding germplasm (‘Scifresh’ = Jazz^TM and its siblings, other HortResearch selections, Pacific^TM series and ‘Gala’), but also using Australian cultivars, such as ‘Cripp’s Pink’ (Pink Lady^TM). In addition, commercial cultivars best adapted to Catalonia were used for crossing.
More than 42,600 seedlings have been raised, of which some 16,000 seedlings are growing in selection plots at Gimenells, Lleida, Spain.
The first flowering seedlings (2% and 32% of the first 5,260 planted in 2006) were observed in spring 2006 and 2007, respectively.
The selection process based on fruit quality will commence in Autumn 2007.

XII EUCARPIA Symposium on Fruit Breeding and Genetics

I. Batlle, L. Lozano, I. Iglesias, J. Carbó, J. Bonany, A. White, R. Weskett, R.K. Volz

Malus domestica, cultivar, breeding, controlled crosses, selection, fruit quality

https://doi.org/10.17660/ActaHortic.2009.814.28