Introduction to Rootstock experiments

Dr Mark O'Connell: I'm standing in a field orchard called the Stone Fruit Field Laboratory at Tatura. We have a rootstock experiment here, one on peach and one on nectarine. This is the Rose Bright Nectarine Field experiment. We're in the second year, trying to establish these trees. We didn't have much success in budding these trees last summer, so we've re-budded them this year and in future years we'll set up different crop load on each tree and look at five different root stocks. So this field experiment is on Rose Bright nectarine, early season nectarine. We have five different root stocks here. We have Krymps 1, Krymps 86, Cornerstone, Nemaguard and Cadaman. The trees will be trained as a four leader vase. They have two metre tree spacing, four and a half made a row spacing, and we'll set up different crop load, different fruit number pear tree in years three, third leaf on-wards. We'll have low, medium and high crop loads and we will look at the distribution of sugars, so bricks, high bricks content. And we would argue that the low crop load treatment and interactions with rootstock will help us understand the way the tree intercepts light and partitions those resources into the fruit to make high quality fruit.