Apple production is a high-input crop facing many challenges regarding disease and pest control. Especially in organic farming, the use of direct control measures is limited and the indirect control measures, such as the choice of robust cultivars, is of high importance.
Solution
Robust cultivars, which are tolerant to apple scab, powdery
mildew, and fireblight, help to control these main diseases that occur in central Europe and reduce the need for direct control measures.
Description
The use of robust apple cultivars can contribute to the reduction of plant protection applications.
Practical recommendations
How to choose a variety?
Ask yourself the following questions to choose a suited variety for your production context:
• Do I want to produce table apples or cider apples? (this PA is only relevant for table apples)
• Do I want to reach a certain yield?
• How intensively do I want to practice plant protection?
o Which diseases are most common in my orchard?
o Which pests are most common in my orchard?
• Do I want to sell the apples to a retailer or via direct marketing? If you want to sell to a retailer, you have to check which varieties they accept before planting. If you want to directly market your apples, you might consider having a broad palette of varieties covering all taste groups and a longer selling period.
o Which palette of varieties regarding the taste do I want to offer?
o Which harvesting periods do I want to cover?
o Do I have storage capacities?
In order to use the comment function, you must register with the third-party provider "Disqus".
When you activate this function, your browser establishes a direct connection with the servers of the third-party provider. We would like to point out that data is transmitted to the third-party provider after activation, and the latter may set cookies that can also be used for analysis and marketing purposes. For more information, please refer to our privacy policy.
Disqus
In order to use the comment function, you must register with the third-party provider "Disqus".
When you activate this function, your browser establishes a direct connection with the servers of the third-party provider. We would like to point out that data is transmitted to the third-party provider after activation, and the latter may set cookies that can also be used for analysis and marketing purposes. For more information, please refer to our privacy policy.
Activate