Preliminary research concerning deformation resistence of fruits at new sweet cherry cultivars created at fruit growing development station Iasi – Romania

Abstract

The knowledge of deformation rezistence of sweet cherries is very important for a good choice of means and methods of their package, storage and transportation, for fresh consumption on national market or for export. In this paper, the authors present the measurement results about fruits deformation, made on 8 new sweet cherry cultivars homologated at SCDP Iaşi in 1996 – 2006: Cetăţuia, Cătălina, Maria, Golia, Ştefan, Bucium, Iaşirom and Tereza. These was harvested in two maturation stages (before optimum ripening date and full maturation stage), and have registered the fruit deformation under 500 g and 1000 g using an originally device achieved at Fruit Growing Development Station Iaşi – Romania. This mechanical device to measure the resistance of the fruit at deformation can be used for different variants of weights applied over the fruit for diverse fruit-growing species or grapes. The fruit deformation is determined by the difference between the initial position indicated by a needle on a marked scale in millimeters and the position resulted after the fruit deformation under different weight. We noticed the greatest resistance to deformation was registered by the cultivars Bucium, which was harvested before optimum ripening date and Golia, which was harvested in full maturation stage. The smallest resistance to deformation was registered by the cultivar Tereza (which was harvested before optimum ripening date) and cultivar Maria (which was harvested in the full maturity phase). The determinations effectuated represent just a preliminary study and helped us calculate the averages and the difference towards averages for ulterior statistical analysis