Focus on fruit with Johnny Colman
Keep up to date with the latest fruit nutrition and fertigation information with this advice from Yara's fruit specialist.
Improving appearance of stone fruit
The appearance of cherries can greatly influence the value of the harvested fruit crop. Pitting is a significant problem in cherries often as a result of poor nutrition, handling or storage conditions and can make the fruit unmarketable. Deposits on the fruit caused by some foliar applied products can also make the fruit less attractive.
"Fruit appearance used to be a cause for concern and in previous seasons we were seeing unacceptable levels of pitting in our crops of Penny and Regina cherries," explains Emily Cliff of Lower Hope Farms, Herefordshire "we wanted to combat this by increasing the amount of foliar calcium applied throughout the growing period, so we increased the amount of calcium in our nutrient programme which lead to a reduction in pitting, but unfortunately this also lead to calcium deposits on the fruit."
"This season YaraVita STOPIT and YaraVita SENIPHOS were trialled against the standard farm practice," continues Emily "we were really pleased with the results, not only did we achieve excellent fruit quality, we also saw a marked reduction in deposits on the harvested fruit."
Correct crop nutrition utilising calcium sprays to boost flesh and skin quality is important to improve the appearance of cherries, YaraVita STOPIT and YaraVita SENIPHOS both supply calcium in true liquid formulations, so avoiding spray deposits while still supplying useful amounts of available calcium."
Read more about stone fruit nutrition
