‘The trick is to confuse the plant to think it is summer all along and make it bear apple through the year’
Though cheery and blithe in countenance, 74-year-old Chiranjit Parmar, a horticulture scientist from Himachal Pradesh, hopes to radically change the agricultural landscape of the region. After having observed the success of apple cultivation in Batu, Indonesia, Mr. Parmar wants to introduce the fruit, hitherto associated with cooler climes, in the tropical humidity of Karnataka.
“It is an experiment. And like all experiments, it can also fail,” he told the group of farmers who had assembled in the city on Saturday for his seminar on ‘Apple cultivation in Karnataka’.
The idea sounded incredulous to farmers who had travelled from as far away as Kodagu. Apple – whose mass cultivation is associated with regions on the foothills of the Himalayas such as Shimla and Kashmir — needs to have a chilly weather for it to bear fruit in the summer. How then was it supposed to survive in a region where temperatures rarely go below 12 degrees Celsius?
“The trick is to confuse the plant. The broad principle is that just after the sapling experiences chilling in Himachal or Kashmir, it is transported here. As there is not much of a temperature change here during winter, the plant thinks it is summer all along and bears fruit through the year,” Mr. Parmar told the befuddled farmers.
He illustrates this with a picture of cultivation in Indonesia, where, while half the apple orchard bears fruit, the other half is bare. “Crops can be regulated easily, as the leaves can be removed fully to stimulate winter. While in Himachal, we get six to seven tonnes of apple per hectare, in Indonesia, they get 65 tonnes and throughout the year,” he said.
So far, the experiment has seen small orchards set up in Tumkur, Somwarpet, Sringeri, and Uppinangadi – all through saplings sent by Mr. Parmar. In his first visit to the region, he said the results were encouraging, and in Tumkur, the plants were already bearing fruit within two years. “In Himachal, apple trees take five years to bear fruit. Here, it grows faster and incessantly into very tall trees as there is no crop fall or dormancy during winter,” he said.
Challenges
However, the tropical climate also brings with it a set of problems that is yet to be scientifically dealt with. For example, trees are susceptible to a variety of diseases and insect, while methods to reduce the tree height and grafting of trees needed to be worked out.
‘The trick is to confuse the apple tree to think it is always summer’
source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> National> Karnataka / by Staff Correspondent / Mangalore – April 22nd, 2013
