Influence of Different Training Systems on Peach Trees Under Intertropical Altitude Conditions in Colombia

Colombia has about 5,000 cultivated hectares of temperate fruit trees (peach, plum, pear and apple) reaching in 2010 an amount of 52,984 tons of fruit production. The department of Boyacá, which is found in the central region of Colombia, on the Andes, in the range 1,800-3,000 m.s.l. produces the most amount of temperate fruit in the country and its potential for peach trees cultivation has been widely highlighted by many Authors. About peach, there are still some problems regarding the low yielding and fruit quality and the neglected application of rational cultural practices. The natural forms that trees tend to adopt when they are not pruned, induce problems for their stability and break their branches for the weight of fruit. Cultural practices like pruning and thinning are rarely subject to specific investigations on a local level. For these reasons in 2011 a wide experiment was started for peach, but also apple, pear and plum, to check the vegetative and reproductive response of these fruit species rationally pruned and thinned. In particular, this study is relevant to the results, obtained for the peach trees, in the first 19 months after plantation and regarding some vegetative and productive preliminary data which were recorded at the end of this period.