Neville Lawson, owner of the "Scallaway" property on the outskirts of Blenheim, currently has a fantastic crop of cherries on his hands this season. Back in August, pre bud-burst, he trialed a specialised fertiliser called ERGER G on part of his cherry crop to help alleviate the risks from seasonal variations to which the cherry industry is so prone.
As a fruit tree comes out of its dormancy stage it requires a given number of hours of cold temperature, without which there is the risk of incomplete and uneven shooting along the plant, dropping of reproductive buds, a reduction in production and an uneven and prolonged ripening. Composed of inorganic nitrogen, mono and disaccharide's, proteins and enzymes, ERGER G speeds up and strengthens those phenomena which normally occur during the hours of cold temperatures.
"It brings the trees out of dormancy early and that can be good in itself but it all depends on the pollination conditions and if it's early and the weather conditions were awful you could miss out on your crop," he noted.
"But it's obviously great to get a bit of advantage, if you can get your cherries coming on a bit earlier and get them to the market sooner that can be a plus, particularly in the New Zealand market to take advantage of the early prices."
Neville is presently harvesting his 'Mertons' cherry crop which had the ERGER G applied to them and it was earlier than usual and is doing well, and they were some of the first on the market. But the crop that is the most interesting is the quality export 'Dawson' variety.
Walking down his tidy rows of trees, to the sound of bird scarers, the heavily laden trees were colouring up well and provided a striking contrast to the untreated trees.
"We have a lot of 'Dawson' here and the big thing for us is that we can control our crop a bit more, we can harvest the early ones in a bit of comfort knowing that the others are going to come on a bit later. So it's a good management tool. And you may just capitalise on that early market that you perhaps wouldn't otherwise."
