Hi. I'm now standing in the, what we call that demonstration part of the orchard. Our main reason here is to try to build the trees for mechanical pruning in different shapes. So in this case we have a variety that is called O' Henry. It's not actually new, we know that, but it's for us researchers to test on chilling injury testing. And, this tree we're trying to train them as a palmette that becomes a nice green wall that is able to cover up the entire space. Here we have two point something, 2.2-2.3m space between trees and we create the big nice wall by spacing the canopy, the branches out, and these internal ones. We are able to grow the tree and occupy all the space with a very short width of the canopy. Then we will be able to pass along with a automatic chain saw, sort of, and do mechanical pruning and the top as well. In this part of the orchard we are testing another kind of tree shaping, still with having in mind mechanical pruning. In this we are trying a cordon that is not a usual shape before peaches. This is again O'Henry. A cordon is made of two horizontal branches going on the wire, and attached to the trellis where we will have, next year, vertical shoots that they will be our fruiting wall, and we'll try to cover the entire wall with this vertical fruiting shoots and passing with a mechanical pruner, automatic mechanical pruner in this direction. Again 40 to 50 centimetre wide sort of canopy.

I'm standing in a demonstration block of the stone fruit field laboratory at Tatura. These peach trees here are peach O'Henry, a late season variety, and they're buffer row trees. And we've set these this canopy up. These are 2 year old,  second leaf tree. We've set this canopy up as something different and radical. A cordon tree training method, and we're comparing that with this sister panels along the row here of a vertical palmette type canopy arrangement. We've got two point four metre tree spacing, four and a half meter row spacing, all under micro drip irrigation. These are in their second leaf.

I'm standing in front of the demonstration section of the stone fruit field laboratory at Tatura. My name's Mark O'Connor, research scientist. Today I want to highlight recently pruned peach O'Henry trees. We have a palmette design tree architecture, and a novel one, a novel tree design, a cordon system. These are three year old trees now, coming into full production. And we're aiming to do a 2-D canopy. Approximately about 50-60 centimetres wide, a fruiting wall that potentially could one day be used for mechanical pruning and mechanical harvesting.