Six-month-old trees of hybrids ‘Bradley’, ‘Geffner’, ‘Priestly’, ‘Lisa’, ‘47-18’, and ‘75-9’ grafted into ‘Lessard Thai’ sugar apple rootstock were transplanted to the field on 8 Aug. 2001 and were arranged in a randomized complete block design with four replications. ‘Bradley’ is one of the first named selections of atemoya. ‘Geffner’ and ‘Priestly’ are Israeli selections (Morton, 1987). ‘Lisa’ is ‘Libby’ cherimoya x ‘Red Sugar’ sugar apple, ‘47-18’ and ‘75-9’ originated from controlled pollination crosses of ‘Geffner’ atemoya x ‘San Pablo’ A. reticulata, and ‘Spain’
cherimoya x ‘Felipe Canul’ A. reticulata, respectively. All plant material was obtained from Zill’s High Performance Plants (Boynton Beach, FL) and shipped air freight to Puerto Rico. ‘Lisa’, ‘47-18’, and ‘75-9’ are atemoya hybrids developed in that nursery by Mr. Gary Zill and have shown commercial potential in nonreplicated plots at the nursery. Before transplanting, the soil was chisel plowed to a depth of 90 cm. Planting holes of 1.5-ft depthwere dug with an auger connected by a drive shaft to the power-take-off unit of a tractor. On transplanting day, each grafted tree received 11 g granular P provided in the form of triple superphosphate. Within a replication, plots for each hybrid contained two trees spaced 4 m apart and 6 m between adjacent rows in a triangular array, 168 trees/acre. As an effort to identify hybrids not needing artificial pollination, hand pollination was not performed in this study. This experiment was surrounded by two guard rows of custard apple seedlings.