Regional Roundup
Dennis Robinson
Te Puke
Te Puke kiwifruit growers are waiting anxiously for spring to see what the impact of Psa will be. Overseas experience has shown us that those who have a protection program in place may be better off than those who don’t. We cannot afford to be complacent.
The Te Puke area produced some record crops but also some disappointing crops and you can’t help but feel this may be a pattern that continues.
The long, hot, dry summer was good for the control of Psa but it did impact on fruit size in some cases.
NZKGI has begun a new term with some new members and some younger members, which is great to see.
The core projects still remain – these include protection and retention of the SPE, increasing grower returns and transparency, grower welfare in the in the face of Psa, plus training and up-skilling the workforce.
We remain cautiously optimistic about the year ahead.
Mark Gardiner
Waikato
While we’re all waiting with bated breath to see what transpires over springtime, July turned out to be a really good month for getting on and doing things like pruning and grafting.
You quite often get fogs in the Waikato which can slow things down and is less than ideal for pruning and grafting.
We’re having to be more weather-conscious as we’re pruning and working the orchards – we tend to be chasing gangs out of situations where we don’t want them pruning in less than ideal conditions. It makes it harder for pruning gangs too, because you can’t just soldier on like you used to. We’re more particular about using the best weather for the right job.
We’ve got quite a diverse area in climate and topography, with orchards from Te Kuiti to Paeroa to Huntly and it covers a large area but overall, it’s been a reasonably mild winter and generally less frosts than other years. It’s also been drier than we anticipated, despite being wet earlier on.
Psa still isn’t widespread but there have been a number of Waikato growers taking up the opportunity to diversify into Gold3 and most of the Hort16A has now been changed over.
We’ll be watching that fairly intensely to see how the conversion over from Hort16A goes.
Carol Craig
Auckland/Franklin
We had a good harvest in the Auckland region with size and taste higher than usual in the Green, although the Hort 16a size was down - the cold spring played havoc and it was cold during pollination.
The late rain near harvest helped some of the sizes and it’s been keeping well in storage.
It’s been a warmer than usual winter but we have had some frosts and we’ve still had some winter chill.
We’re all holding our breath and waiting to see what happens with Psa in the spring. We were up to 38 infected orchards by the end of summer and we’ve only had one more since then, so the fine weather has been marvellous but we’re wondering what will happen with the spring. If it’s cold and wet, things could go pear-shaped.
In the Auckland region, we’ve got growers trying a few different things on top of the copper sprays, so we’re all very interested to see how that works for them, while there’s been a good uptake of the new varieties up here.
Andrew Hill
Coromandel
Our harvest was an interesting one - we’ve got mainly Gold on our own orchard and we had the lowest production for years due to fruit size. That was mainly because of pollination and spring weather and that was general throughout the area for Gold growers.
Green crops were much better off and didn’t have the same sort of issues – one local guy told me he’d had his best crop ever.
Around 40 percent of the orchards in our area have been impacted by Psa and there has been some conversion, mainly to G3. While the symptom levels over the winter have been really low and we didn’t see much progression during the past summer, spring will be different and we’ll see symptoms pop up. It will just be a case of wait and see.
As this magazine is coming out, we’ll be taking a close look at our Gold crops to see what’s happening. Hopefully the actions taken over the winter will keep the inoculum levels down and we won’t get a cold, wet spring.
We certainly haven’t seen the same winter chilling as previous years but it’s been great weather to get on and do your work. We’re ahead on pruning and all the orchard work and most people have finished their grafting.
