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- Author or Editor: S.J. McArtney x
- HortScience x
Dormant, 2-year-old, own-rooted `Chambourcin' grapevines (Vitis sp.) were subjected to two levels of root pruning (none, two-thirds roots removed) and were subsequently trained with either one or two canes. Vines were destructively harvested at bloom and after harvest when dormant to determine the effect of stored reserves in the root and competition between shoots for these reserves on vine growth and berry development. Removing 78% of the root system reduced shoot elongation and leaf area more effectively than did increasing the number of shoots per vine from one to two. Root pruning reduced the elongation rate of shoots for 45 days after budbreak, whereas increasing the shoot number reduced the shoot elongation rate for only 20 days after budbreak. A positive linear relationship was observed between leaf area per shoot at bloom and the number of berries per single cluster. These results demonstrate the importance of 1) the roots as a source of reserves for the initial development of vegetative tissues in spring, and 2) the rapid development of leaf area on an individual shoot for high set of grape berries on that shoot.
A number of mass—diameter equations were compared for their potential use in indirect measurement of fruit masses of `Royal Gala' apple (Malus ×domestica). The fruit fresh-mass—diameter relationship changed with time during the season, hence no single function fitted the data well. Smooth piecewise functions that assume different relationships for intervening segments of a curve bounded by knots on the x-axis are particularly useful for modeling such data. The curve is said to be smooth because the first derivative of the function is continuous on the interval, including the knots. Two such equations, a three-parameter piecewise power function and a five-parameter spline exponential function, provided good fits to data. For both equations, the estimated mean bias on individual fruit predictions was within 5% of predicted mass over the two validating data sets. As for the precision conditional on no bias, a sample size of 20 fruit gave standard errors within 2.5% of mean predicted mass. These precisions are adequate to meet the industry requirements for monitoring fruit mass through the growing season. There was evidence of a seasonal difference in the estimated bias, but we were unable to confirm that this variation resulted from seasonal differences in fruit shape. Application of these two equations to data from other regions suggested that divergence from the estimated functional form may in fact be greater under increasingly different climatic conditions. Hence, further investigations to identify possible sources of these differences are necessary before the proposed equations can be applied across climatically different regions.