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SOUR AND SWEET CHERRY BREEDING AND PRODUCTION IN HUNGARY
Sour cherry orchards cover more than 5500 ha, producing 60 to 80 thousand tonnes of marketed fruit annually.
About 99% of the yield consists of dark purple, very staining types.
A very small amount of ‘Montmorency’-type red cherries (varietal group Pipacs) are grown for export.
The sour cherry ripening season extends from early June to 5–10 July.
About 30% of the total yield is harvested before 20 June, 40% between 20–30 June, and about 30% in July.
The percentage of the main varieties grown is: 35% ‘Érdi botermo’, 35% ‘Ujfehértói fürtös’, 7% clones of the variety ‘Pándy’, 5% from 3 varieties of the ‘Cigány’ type, 3% ‘Meteor korai’, 3% ‘Érdi jubileum’, and 12% other varieties (‘Korai pipacs’, ‘Pipacs 1’, ‘Kántorjánosi’, ‘Csengodi’, M 172 and other hybrids).
Over the last twenty years, sour cherry has shown the most dynamic growth among fruits in production (Figure 1). The area of commercial sour cherry orchards doubled, owing to the introduction of new, profitable varieties.
This expansion slowed down in the 1980s due to large scale removal of the old orchards.
New varieties bred and/or selected at the Research Institute for Horticulture (now called Enterprise for Extension and Research in Fruit Growing and Ornamentals) have had an important role in the expansion of the sour cherry industry in Hungary.
Hybrid varieties were released by the late Pál Maliga, and János Apostol.
The selection of local varieties was done by Ferenc Petho, Tibor Szabó, Sándor Kovács and János Apostol, and clonal selection of the groups of ‘Pándy’ and ‘Cigány’ cherries by Sándor Brózik, Ferenc Nyujtó and Zoltán Éles.
The sour cherry breeding program has been continued by János Apostol.
We have more than 2000 hybrids from age 1 to 14. Some of them are important for their very early ripening time (about 10 days earlier than the established early varieties), and others are disease-resistant.
To get disease-resistant varieties, we started a joint breeding program with Michigan State University in 1990. We selected 11 Monilia (brown rot) and Blumeriella (leaf spot) resistant genotypes from the Hungarian countryside for further breeding.
One of these, a variety named ‘Csengodi’ has good fruit quality and is highly resistant to diseases; it was introduced 3 years ago.
This variety can be grown without any plant protection.