![]() ![]() “He said, ‘You don’t have enough fruit buds, so you don’t want to click prune everything all your fruit is out on those tips, you don’t want to cut it off.’” “We thought we had a pretty good idea of what we were doing with the click pruning and the summer pruning, but (Musacchi) came out and it changed everything,” Perrault said. (TJ Mullinax/Good Fruit Grower)Ĭlick pruning techniques for Cosmic Crispįor Trevor Perrault, owner of Green Acre Farms, it was an eye-opening visit. Growers should “adjust WA 38 pruning on the basis of the flowers you have.” Musacchi demonstrates how he advises never to cut limbs back shorter than the width of four fingers, because shorter cuts tend toward bud extinction. “Don’t overcrop at the beginning, because you will need to build everything again,” he said. Growers who heavily cropped young trees may find they don’t have as many productive spurs as they hoped for the next season, due to the natural spur extinction tendency of this cultivar, Musacchi said. In early 2021, the Yakima Pom Club invited Musacchi to visit a handful of orchards in the Yakima Valley to talk about pruning maturing orchards. Making stub cuts that encourage renewal, rather than cutting out limbs entirely, is key, he said. Over the past few years, working directly with four employees at a time, he taught his crews the new style they use for pruning WA 38. ![]() Orchard manager Jorge Acevedo said the fourth-leaf block appeared to carry about 65 to 70 bins per acre, after cropping 31 bins per acre last year. Winter pruning your fourth- and fifth-leaf Cosmic Crisp - Videos “When Stefano started working with us in the second leaf, we were really scratching our heads about how this looked when we pruned it,” he said. ![]() Monument Hill Orchards in Quincy, one of the field day stops, is a testament that “click pruning works,” said Harold Schell of Chelan Fruit. He encourages the click pruning approach: a cycle of heading cuts that promote renewal of young fruiting wood and prevent the variety from pushing out of its space in high-density systems. Since WSU released WA 38 in 2016, Musacchi has given many talks and tours focused on pruning and training. Research has shown that 51 percent of the clusters set one fruit, 13 percent set two and the rest set none, so he recommends maintaining a high number of flower buds when pruning. “It’s hard to manage crop load with a variety that only sets one cluster,” he said. (Kate Prengaman/Good Fruit Grower)īecause the variety self-thins - an advantage in that it minimizes the cost of thinning - pruning represents the primary tool for controlling crop load. Growers have learned more about the variety over the past few seasons, he said, and “now, you have a feeling about what I have been trying to say about blind wood and keeping the trees producing for many years.” Blind wood, seen in this Yakima Valley orchard, can be a problem for WA 38 growers, especially those who heavily cropped young trees. So, you want as many regenerative points as possible,” Musacchi said to growers gathered at a September field day organized by WSU. “You need some spurs that are resting and some that are producing. That means growers need to approach winter pruning to strike the right balance between crop load and renewal to manage the tip-bearing variety’s tendency for blind wood.įrom the perspective of crop load, managing WA 38, the apple marketed as Cosmic Crisp, always comes back to pruning, according to Stefano Musacchi, endowed chair for tree fruit physiology at Washington State University and an expert on WA 38 horticulture. Con Cosmic Crisp, no cortes tus opcionesĪcross Washington, WA 38 trees are maturing into full production.This article is also available in Spanish: ![]()
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