Early tree performances, precocity and fruit quality attributes of newly introduced apricot cultivars grown under western Serbian conditions

In this work, 19 newly introduced and some traditional apricot cultivars were evaluated by 20 phenological and agronomical traits and fruit quality attributes. The results showed a wide variation in phenological data, tree vigour (TCSA), productivity [yield per tree, cumulative yield (CY) and yield efficiency (YE)], and fruit quality attributes such as fruit and stone weight, flesh/stone ratio, fruit dimensions, size, shape index, soluble solids content (SSC), titratable acidity (TA) and ripening index (RI). The average onset of blossoming varied from 16 March to 20 March, whereas harvest was between 1 June and 12 September. The most vigorous trees were ‘Ketch Pshar’. The best productivity was observed in ‘Fardao’ and the poorest in ‘Farbaly’. More apricots were relatively small to medium in fruit size, whereas ‘Candela’ had very large fruits. Most cultivars tended towards a round shape, whereas some had round/ flat and/or ovoid-shaped fruits. The highest values for SSC were observed in ‘Ketch Pshar’, ‘Candela’ and ‘Fardao’, TA in ‘Candela’ and RI in ‘Hungarian Best’. There was a medium to high correlation between yield properties, fruit and stone size and flesh/seed ratio, also between SSC versus acidity and RI. As observed by PCA, the first three components represented 74.3% of total variance (38.3%, 22.1% and 19.8% for PC1, PC2 and PC3, respectively)