Growth Characteristics of Sweet Cherry Genotypes Selected from North Anatolia

Abstract

One of the gene centers of cherry is Northern Anatolia. Cherry grows naturally in this region, especially in passage areas such as Amasya, and on the coastline such as Giresun. For this reason, this region has a great diversity of species. An orchard was established on mazzard rootstock in 2007 with the genotypes collected from this region between 2005 and 2006. It is very important to use these genotypes in cultivar and rootstock breeding. Therefore, it is essential to reveal their growth characteristics. Thus, in this study was aimed to determine the some growth characteristics such as growth behavior of tree, annual shoot lengths, and the number of nodes per 100 cm on one old shoot of 49 genotypes collected from the region in 2020. In the experiment, it was found that 1 genotype was very weak, 3 genotypes were weak, 12 genotypes were very strong, and the others were strong and moderately strong. The tree trunk diameters of the genotypes tested varied between 10.90 and 19.43 cm, the annual shoot length between 8.17 and 24.17 cm, the distance between the nodes on the annual shoot varied between 2.04 and 3.97 cm. In addition, bud burst dates, which are important for rootstock and variety breeding, were also observed in these genotypes. Vegetative buds burst between 10 March and 6 May in trialed genotypes. By making use of these data, the promising genotypes for breeding studies have been revealed. © 2024 International Society for Horticultural Science. All rights reserved.