Promoting Lateral Branching on Young Sweet Cherry Trees

Young sweet cherry (Prunus avium) trees are typically upright, vegetatively vigorous, and nonprecocious, taking 5 to 6 years to come into production. To produce fruit in high-density orchards by year 3 or 4, development of lateral shoots for potential fruiting is critical in year 2 or 3. An experiment was designed to promote lateral branching on 2-year-old trees. The experiment was conducted in a commercial orchard in Roosevelt, Wash., with `Bing' and `Van' on the vigorous rootstocks Mazzard and Colt. The trees were planted at 415 trees per acre with three scaffolds trained into a “V” canopy design. The experimental variables were treatments with and without Promalin (1.8% BAP plus 1.8% GA4+7), applied at a ratio of 1:3 in latex paint at green tip stage; superimposed on these treatments were either heading cuts of each scaffold to 2 m long (or tipping the scaffold if it was <2 m), removing four to five buds subtending the terminal bud, a combination of heading and bud removal, or controls. On trees that were not treated with Promalin, three additional treatments included either removing subtending buds at budbreak, or removing buds at multiple locations along the scaffold at green tip or at budbreak. New lateral shoots were counted 4 weeks after budbreak, and the quality of the shoots (shoot diameter and angle of emergence) was measured at the time of summer pruning. Interactions between Promalin, bud manipulation, and pruning will be discussed in relation to development of canopy structure.