Champlain Valley Passive Bitter Pit Prediction for 'Honeycrisp'
Mike Basedow, Tree Fruit Specialist
Eastern New York Commercial Horticulture
While bitter pit can cause serious losses for 'Honeycrisp', there are a few tools that can help us predict the extent of bitter pit damage we might see, allowing us to make informed decisions of where to put fruit from particular blocks. One such method is the Passive Method.
Three weeks before anticipated harvest, members of the ENYCHP collected 'Honeycrisp' samples from 33 orchard blocks ranging from Saratoga to Clinton counties. We placed 100 apples from each block in bushel bins at room temperature for 3 weeks, and subsequently rated them for bitter pit presence. This "passive method" was developed by Chris Watkin's lab, and can be used as a rough predictor of the percent of bitter pit one can expect coming out of storage when fruit are conditioned and stored at 38°F. The results for Northeast NY show the average incidence of bitter pit across the value is roughly 15%. That being said, there is a great deal of variation between blocks.
Passive Bitter Pit Prediction for 'Honeycrisp' (pdf; 110KB)
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