John Kempf explains why bigger leaves in cherry orchards mean higher yields and healthier trees. Large leaves generate more energy through photosynthesis and pull nutrients from roots to the canopy more effectively. Bigger leaves also strengthen disease and pest resistance.
Chapters
In a cherry orchard, leaves are the engine that drives the crop, and leaves accomplish two really important things for the tree. Number one, through photosynthesis, that's where energy is generated to provide the tree with the energy that it needs to size, size cherries, to set a lot of cherries on the tree. And the other thing is a lot of leaves means that there's a lot of evapotranspiration. There's a lot of pull trees naturally want to pull nutrients from the soil up into the canopy. And when you have a big canopy with a lot of leaves, you have a lot of ability just built in, raw ability to pull nutrients from the roots up into the canopy. And so if you look at a cherry tree, there's a lot of variety in leaf size. So these two leaves are are from the same tree. And this leaf, think about how much less energy it generates in this leaf here. It's profound. And so the more leaves that you have that are large like this one, the bigger they can be, the more energy that you have to grow this crop, next year's crop, grow canopy, provide the energy that the tree needs to resist pests and disease and that sort of thing. So we really, really focus on how large our leaves are, and we want them to be as large as we can. And something that's been interesting with AEA is I actually didn't know how big a cherry tree's leaves, you know, could get. And now it's sort of normal when I go out into an orchard to see a lot of big leaves. But I think about in the past, it always— it hasn't always been that way. There were a lot of small leaves in the past.
