AN APRICOT GRAFT-COMPATIBILITY EVALUATION DEVICE

Apricot graft-compatibility is a major concern for most of the new released cultivars because they are often selected and rapidly evaluated on rather young trees, and then released without any graft-compatibility evaluation.
Thus, fruit growers are directly facing breakages induced by graft-incompatibility between cultivars and root-stocks in orchard without any preventive indicator.

In localized graft-incompatibility the focus is on the lack of continuity between the tissues of the rootstock and the cultivar.
In order to estimate the level of fragility of the graft-union a mechanical tester has been developed.
The principle is based on the evaluation of the force to be applied to break the graft union.
The data collected are based on the force, the pressure, the moment, the work and the diameter of the graft-combinations, all along the traction phase from the beginning to the breakage point.
The tester has been evaluated with 40 combinations of around 10 replications each in order to appreciate the internal and external variations.
The preliminary results allow the separation of the graft combinations on the base of their elasticity, pressure and the surface of the junction between stock and scion.