Feasibility of peach bloom thinning with hand-held mechanical devices

Abstract

[EN] The use of hand-held mechanical devices to thin blooms of peach trees trained into the " free Italian vase" form was studied. Three devices were tested, and no differences were found among them in terms of thinning time and number of fruits per cm 2 of trunk cross-sectional area (TCSA) at harvesting. Thinning, by hand or mechanically, reduced the yield per tree by 26-33% with respect to not thinning; however, thinning increased the fruit size. In both years, the yields of fruit >67mm in the thinned trees ranged from 40.4 to 53.4kgtree -1, respectively, whereas in the un-thinned trees, it was 25.1 and 18.2kgtree -1 in 2009 and 2010, respectively. Hand thinning took 385hha -1, and mechanical thinning reduced this time by 89%. The cost of hand thinning was 4.8z€tree -1, whereas the cost of mechanical thinning ranged from 0.4 to 1.1z€tree -1. The economic study showed that the total yield value was similar with hand and mechanical thinning, but the cost of mechanical thinning was only 10-18% that of hand thinning. © 2011 Elsevier B.V.