Fruit of the Orchard

 This entry will cover my final thoughts on my internship at HortTREC in the fruit research department. Before participating in this internship, I had very little experience with horticulture work. My only exposure came from my classwork and lab work at Texas A&M. Although it has broadened my knowledge of this field, the work I did in this internship showed me how to apply the things I have studied.  Firstly, caring for plants at different stages in their production allowed me to better visualize the crop life cycle. Using the peaches grown in this program as an example, I had the opportunity to work with the fruit crop at different stages.  This included tending to peach 'nemaguard' rootstocks, observing the process of grafting nemaguards, disbudding as the scion shoots grew, and pruning back more rootstock for the same budding process. In the field, I got to work with mature peach tree varieties, harvesting their fruit and taking data on them. The data included BRIX...