| High density sweet cherry (Prunus avium) orchards using highly productive cultivars and dwarfing rootstocks usually require crop load regulation to achieve high quality fruit. Among the strategies used to reduce crop load in highly productive combinations, fruiting spur thinning (FST, spur extinction) before budbreak has been suggested to be an effective way to improve fruit size. Currently, there is little information about the effect of spur thinning on sweet cherry orchards using self-fertile cultivars grafted on vigorous rootstocks. For this reason, the objective of the present study was to evaluate the effects of manual FST on fruit quality and vegetative growth of the cultivar 'Lapins' grafted on the rootstock 'Mazzard F-12/L with 0, 50 and 75% spur... |
