#but a lemon tree was grafted onto it | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

lazyevaluationranch · 3 years

Text

On a post about the Blue Haired Girlfriend's quixotic citrus breeding experiments, @voidingintotheshout asked:

I mean, if you wanted a hearty citrus relative, why didn’t you just grow Osage Orange? They can grow as far north as Michigan which is surely further north than anyone could reasonably expect to grow a citrus tree. They’re not edible but then hearty orange isn’t either. Osage Orange are so cool and such a interesting historical plant from the Shelterbelt era of American agriculture. Apparently they do smell like citrus.

This is part three of three. Part one. Part two.

Now you've done it! It's time for A Very Brief (But Also Insufficiently Brief) History of Twentieth Century Hardy Citrus Cultivation! Growing citrus trees this far north is kind of nuts, it's true, but I promise you it is not even close to the weirdest things people have done to grow citrus in places where the citrus doesn't think it should grow.

A note: This post will written using the Swingle citrus taxonomy system, including things that are definitely wrong. The citrus taxonomic tree looks like that one box of orphaned computer cords I keep moving with me to new houses "in case I need them" except some sort of adorable five-dimensional kitten has entertained herself with them and some of the resulting knots are not technically possible in our space-time continuum.

The powers that be gave us citrus because nothing pleases them like seeing a geneticist cry.

1. The Migrant Trees

The Soviet Union wanted lemons for tea, and they wanted to be independent enough not to have to trade with anyone else to get them, which meant they wanted to grow their own citrus. That part of the world is not a great place to grow plants that die when the temperature goes below zero, but at the foundation of the Soviet Union, there were citrus orchards in the warmest part of Georgia, along the Black Sea. Specifically, there was about, uh, one and a half square kilometers of somewhat implausible citrus orchard.

Hang on, it is about to get way less plausible.

This is the great citrus migration: any tree that did well in one spot, they'd try planting its seeds a few kilometres further north, or a few kilometres further east. Prizes were offered for breeding hardier citrus. Slowly the orchards spread, but they were extremely weird orchards.

It's usually a few degrees warmer at ground level than up in the air, and there's way less wind. So as the trees grew, they were bent over and tied along the ground. Some of them had the central trunk run in a straight line along the ground, with branches spreading out from it like the leaves of a fern, like an espaliered tree on its side. Others were starfish shaped, with the central trunk looped down until it ended up next to the base, and the branches sprawling out along the ground from the centre like starfish legs. The citrus trees were no taller than particularly vigorous strawberry plants, but they survived the winters, and you could throw a blanket over them to help them stay warm.

None of that helped if the ground froze solid, so they needed Underground Citrus. You'd dig a ditch, down below the lowest area where the ground froze, and you'd plant flat Starfish Trees or Flat Frond Trees running along the bottom of it, too deep to freeze. In winter, you'd just cover the ditch with boards any time the temperature was expected to go below freezing - citrus would tolerate the lack of light, but not the cold. Mandarins (Citrus reticulata) seemed to do best, so that’s most of what was grown.

It is a nearly unimaginable amount of work to grow citrus this way, along the bottoms of pits and trenches. We are experimentally trying to grow a Soviet-developed mandarin breed of unknown parentage, Shirokolistvennyi, but we will definitely not be putting in that level of effort.

2. The Mixed Up Trees

There are a couple species of citrus that tolerate cold well, but taste awful. A lot of effort has gone into crossbreeding them with more edible citrus. The results are ... mixed.

The Ichang Papeda (Citrus cavaleriei) generally survives temperatures down to -18 degrees C. It is stoic and calm and has mastered emptiness. Unfortunately, it has mastered emptiness too well. The fruit smells like lemons, with maybe a hint of rose, but there's nothing to eat here. It has a rind and seeds. No juice, no flesh.

(Photo by Michael Saalfield)

The Ichang Papeda is the parent or grandparent to several delicious, extremely sour Asian citrus types. Yuzu/yuja smells like grapefruit and clean wet stones from the bottom of a fast-flowing stream. Sudachi smells like grapefruit and leaves with dew on them. (I haven't met kabosu or any other papeda hybrids personally, but they are numerous.) They're all too sour to eat plain, unless you really need to turn your face inside out for some reason, but make for excellent flavouring.

(We have a yuzu tree and a sudachi tree and they're surviving, but no fruit yet.)

Trifoliate orange (Poncirus trifoliata) can survive temperatures down to -30 degrees C. This may be partly because, uniquely amoung citrus, they can drop leaves in autumn or winter and regrow them in spring, like a maple tree. They also produce an internal antifreeze. They are angry, twisted, thorny little plants that yell swears when you walk past them. They make a great hedge. The fruit is furry, smells like flowers and pine trees and taste like burnt, bitter plastic. It may or may not be possible to breed the horrible taste completely out of trifoliate oranges without losing cold-hardiness, if it's due to their antifreeze chemicals. Here’s Stabby:

(Photo by Rob Hille)

Even the least terrible trifoliate crossbreeds are bitter enough to qualify as “acquired tastes.” There are recipes for trifoliate marmalade: put a dozen trifoliate oranges, a kilogram of sugar, and a kilogram of pebbles in a pot, cook until it gels, then sieve out the oranges and eat the pebbles.

We are growing a trifoliate orange / minneola orange hybrid. And, of course, someday our own trifoliate hybrids. The Blue Haired Girlfriend planted 200 trifoliate oranges a couple years ago. There are fewer now, but the survivors have lived through two winters of snow and frost, and they might have somehow gotten more stabby. We're going to breed them, to each other or to less angry fruit, try and make something new and good from them.

I've limited this post to twentieth century hardy citrus breeding, but I have to give a shoutout to somatic hybridization, a decidedly twenty first century technique, where you take a cell from each of two different plants, remove their cell walls, put them next to eachother, and shock them with electricity until they merge into a single cell whose nucleus contains all genes from both plants. Then the new plant is like, "Wow, I guess these are all my genes? It seems like a lot, haha, but it's not like somebody made me from dismembered body parts and electricity, that is not how science works. Anyway I guess it's time to do some plant stuff now."

3. The Mutant Trees

In the 1950s, people started using radiation to randomly scramble the genes of plants. You'd irradiate seeds enough to change the genes somehow, and then you'd have to plant them to see what had happened. Maybe it was people horrified by the atomic bomb desperately wanting to find some life-supporting use for atomic fission, maybe it was government-supported cold war "atom bombs are good actually, look how many we have, USSR" propaganda. Probably both.

This time period also saw serious plans for Orion, a spaceship with a huge metal plate for a butt, intended to be propelled by exploding atomic bombs under it, which I am not actually making up.

Thousands of people in Europe and the US signed up to receive seeds with random mutations in the mail, plant them, and report back on what they heck they grew into and if it had any useful weirdness. (The gamma radiation used to mutate the seeds did not make them radioactive themselves - the seeds were completely safe.) There were also more formal and carefully controlled university research programs in China, Japan, and the US, where plants where grown in a circular research garden with a coverable radiation source at the centre, so that the farther you got from the centre, the less radiation the plants got. Radiation breeding is less popular than it used to be, but Japan still has a very productive citrus radiation breeding program.

The most popular radiation-bred citrus is the "Rio Red" grapefruit and its offspring, which has a much deeper red than non-mutant red grapefruit.

There aren't many radiation-developed citrus breeds noted for cold-hardiness - with radiation you get whatever you get - but there are a few, and I want one just because I think they're neat, a monument to that lovely human vision that looks at terrible weapons and somehow sees glossy-leaved trees with bright fruit.

4. The Monster Trees

Citrus are usually grown via grafting. That is, you plant a seed from a fast-growing sturdy breed, you let it grow roots and all that, and then you cut the top off and replace it with a branch from a more delicious breed. The two citruses grow together, and you end up with a tree that's disease and cold resistant in the roots, below the graft, but makes tasty fruit above the graft.

Occasionally, this process goes Wrong.

The first recorded instance is the tree called Bizarria, discovered in 1640. Someone attempted to graft a sour orange branch onto a citron. But instead of a clean line between sour orange branches and citron roots, the graft was damaged somehow, and the two different species of cells got tangled and mixed through the whole tree. It has branches that produce citron fruit. It has branches that produce sour orange fruit. And it has branches that produce, uh ... these:

(Photo by Labrina)

Most graft chimeras are made accidentally, when the graft site is damaged. Trifoliate orange is often used as rootstock, so there are many reported chimeras involving trifoliate orange and a nicer fruit. The mixed-up cells can be arranged a lot of ways, but it's possible to have the outside layer of the tree be trifoliate orange, and the core of the tree be the other citrus (periclinal chimera). This means you could theoretically get a tree with frostproof trifoliate leaves and branches, but fruit that doesn’t taste like burnt plastic rolled in quinine.

This lucky monstrosity has, in fact, reportedly happened. Twice. There is the Prague Citsuma, discovered in a greenhouse in Prague and suspected to have been created by a Soviet breeding program. And then there is the Hormish, discovered in China and thought to have been made by frostbite messing up the clean lines of the graft. The Blue Haired Girlfriend has managed to track down budwood from the Prague Citsuma - I’m so excited! - so we'll see how the fierce thorny monster tree with a heart of gold, or at least heartwood of gold, does for us.

5. Conclusion

Humans have been trying to grow citrus trees where they don't belong for nearly two thousand years, at least since the Jewish Diaspora and people trying to grow holy etrog trees - trunks gnarled as barnacle stones and the whole tree scented like the best dream you can't remember - in Europe. Maybe longer.

The Blue Haired Girlfriend's citrus-breeding schemes aren't going to singlehandedly transform Canada into a net citrus exporter. But history shows us: it might be possible to have a little gleaming sweetness from the stony ground here, with the ravens and the fir trees and the auroras. A sweetness we made ourselves, that exists nowhere else.

Or maybe we'll just have a bunch of weird inedible fruit. I don't know, but it's worth finding out, worth weaving together leaf and thorn and stone and the light of our hands as the years unwind. Worth it to have a quixotic project we can expect to spend decades on together, hands and hearts. This is how home is made, sometimes, with a balcony full of angry thorny little trees that shout swears at passerby.

#part three of three #so much doesn't fit in this post #fog gardening #how lemons started the mafia #etrogs in diaspora #citropsis and the african citrus species #we are still discovering new citrus species in oceania!#who knows what we'll make?#and one day we'll scoop up hydrocarbons from Titan's stormy seas and polymerize them and make huge bubble greenhouses filled with citrus #small children will fling squishy citrus at their siblings by the coiled light of Jupiter #which is as it should be #thank you voidingintotheshout for an excuse for all sorts of ranting

835 notes · View notes

essektheylyss · 3 years

Note

Ooh I’m going to say Crave for Fjord and Essek!

This was fun! (And the first that struck an idea—I've decided I'm answering in no particular order this time around.) I took the prompt a little abstract.

His fingers hold the straw hat to his head unnecessarily, the silk ribbon beneath his chin and the support of his pointed ears plenty to keep it from slipping, and he squints against the soft dappled light at the ripened fruit overhead.

The low-hanging tree is laden with it, some so ripe they burst at the seams. His feet are tucked beneath him on his chair, elevated from the sticky sugar crystals rotting into the grass. The air is cloying with a sweet tang, probably a byproduct of the two types of fruit that have been mashed together on the ground by the feet of dogs and children and an old sailor.

The book at his side is less interesting, currently, than the two baskets sitting at the base of the trunk as Fjord ducks low beneath the groping branches, and the two-toned fruits that the tree currently bears.

“I understand the process of grafting,” he says slowly, and at Fjord’s slanted grin, adds, “in theory. But as I understand it, one would need more closely related fruits—“

“Fruits are fruits,” Fjord shrugs, and twists the stem of the lemon in his hand, tossing it lightly among the rest at his feet.

“‘Fruits are fruits’,” Essek scoffs. “For you, perhaps.”

It is not common for Fjord’s grin to span so much of his face while on land.

“Certainly Melora believes in limitations of nature,” Essek continues, as Fjord narrowly misses a low, sweeping branch and pokes into a higher section of the tree, half-obscured by thick bundles of fruit and deep green leaves the same color as his skin.

“Well, sure. But I’m her favorite.” Fjord laughs, the sound bright on the syrupy air. “Don’t tell Caduceus.”

Essek leans back in his seat, feeling every one of the wooden boards against the bone of his shoulder, and leans his hand on his chin. “I am intrigued, Mr. Lavorre. How many types of fruit does this tree bear yearly, in total?”

“Well, it doesn’t get peaches every year, the bastard, but five. Though I think the citrus might be mutating.”

“From what I’ve read, it is prone to do so.”

“I don’t know if my lemons and my clementines will be distinct in two years’ time.”

“A travesty of the highest magnitude, I’m sure.”

“Imagine biting into a clementine as tart as a lemon, Essek.”

“I would prefer not to think of such horrors.”

Fjord doesn’t seem to mind the sticky fruit underfoot, meandering with his sleeves messily rolled above his elbows and his trousers cuffed. His hair is a mess of black and grey these days, more years and less stress to show for them. Essek envies him, on very rare occasions—envies him the easy, stable life he lives and the way years wear upon him, like time has not passed him by.

There is no bitterness to this jealousy—their paths are too different for Essek to allow himself to pretend he is owed either. But in another life, perhaps, if another life was something he wished to undertake, he might wish for such things.

Essek does not even like to get his feet dirty in such a way. He tucks his toes further beneath him and picks up his book again.

Only a few minutes pass before Fjord drops heavily into the rocking chair catty corner to him beneath this chimera tree, a few plump fruits wrapped in his broad palm. He sets two of them on his lap. “Mm,” he calls, and Essek looks up in time to catch the third, a fig as large as the soft pad of his thumb.

His hands are thicker with callouses now, and his nails are kept clipped short as he pinches the stem between his forefinger and thumb, twisting it until he can peel it open, the fresh sweetness of bright red flesh inside cutting through the rot on the air.

“Don’t you clean your yard?” he asks, gesturing to Fjord’s muck-covered toes as he pulls one leg up to rest against the arm of the chair.

“Of course not,” Fjord replies pleasantly. “Weren’t you the one worried about the limitations of nature? Fallen fruit is just another offering.”

“It does not seem an offering fit for a goddess,” Essek says, and Fjord raises an eyebrow.

“And what would you know of what is fit for gods and goddesses?”

Essek splits the soft flesh of the fruit apart, holding it over the grass when it spurts. The sugary juice oozes onto his fingers, coating them, and he lets it seep like blood from a wound. It’s a strange texture, one he was not familiar with until coming to the coast.

“Nothing,” he admits, and sinks his teeth into the flesh of it.

#thank you for the prompt!#fic prompts #cr fic #essek thelyss #fjord #critical role #according to my mother my great-grandfather had a grafted tree with about four or five different fruits on it #and it felt like the kind of bullshit fjord would make for fun #fic prompt

107 notes · View notes

painted-crow · 3 years

Text

Bird systems, trees, crystals, and glass

No, this isn't about yoga or anything. I'm cracking Algorithms to Live By open again for another Obscure Bird Metaphor!

The anon in the post right before this one got me thinking of a thing...

They were a burned Lion modeling Bird, talking about how they hate their system being poked at because (essentially) it's fragile and they're relying on it. I am therefore restraining myself from asking them about this 😂 but I wonder if their system is constructed differently from a healthy Bird's.

Trees

I gave this advice a while back about unburning Bird primary.

Basically: healthy systems have a structure. There’s a hierarchy of beliefs, or as I prefer to think of it, a tree--with very basic core concepts at the trunk: things like "human life is inherently valuable," which can be relied upon not to change a whole lot.

Other beliefs follow from those. If you start from "unnecessary suffering is bad," you can branch into a whole lot of other stuff.

Once you've built up your tree a bit, you just start going through the world and testing everything you hear for truth. A Bird primary does this pretty much unconsciously. They also might start running into conflicts and having to prioritize.

For example, they might hear someone say "suffering is bad! Therefore we should eradicate this genetic disease... by [horrible methods]!" and the Bird will (hopefully) go "no, that is eugenics, and it is Bad because human life is inherently valuable."

So why am I talking about this?

The problem is that things aren't always as obvious as that. The trunk of your system tree might be very solid, and so might the branches that build off of it! But once you start getting into sticks and twigs and leaves, you get more potential for them to cross over each other and need pruning.* So it's very important to have this structure, so that pruning one thing doesn't take down the whole tree.

*That's an actual thing with pruning trees, apparently. I like this metaphor.

When you have time to construct your system at peace, as with a full Bird primary who develops theirs as a kid, or as with someone who just picks up a Bird model because they like it or someone they care about uses it, you usually end up with some semblance of this structure. When your system building is in response to Burning, though...

Crystals and Glass

Stable system structure (say that five times fast) takes time and patience, and is probably incompatible with the "I am relying on this prototype to keep me Okay" of using it as a crutch while Burned.

Systems work by being tinkered with. They're always a work in progress. You can try to come up with one all at once, but it's almost certainly very brittle. (This isn't a judgment on you if you're doing this--it's just, yeah, what you're trying to do is hard and it probably breaks a lot.)

And! I have a new metaphor:

In the late 1970s and early ’80s, Scott Kirkpatrick considered himself a physicist, not a computer scientist. In particular, Kirkpatrick was interested in statistical physics, which uses randomness as a way to explain certain natural phenomena—for instance, the physics of annealing, the way that materials change state as they are heated and cooled. Perhaps the most interesting characteristic of annealing is that how quickly or slowly a material is cooled tends to have tremendous impact on its final structure. As Kirkpatrick explains:

"Growing a single crystal from a melt [is] done by careful annealing, first melting the substance, then lowering the temperature slowly, and spending a long time at temperatures in the vicinity of the freezing point. If this is not done, and the substance is allowed to get out of equilibrium, the resulting crystal will have many defects, or the substance may form a glass, with no crystalline order."

Quote taken from Algorithms to Live By, by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths, in chapter nine, "Randomness"

The annealing process is an interesting one. I'll try to explain--it's like... sometimes, if you make all the obvious immediate right choices, you can railroad yourself into a solution that isn't optimal because you aren't seeing the bigger picture. You reach what's called a local maximum: you've found the best solution available... in the tiny corner you looked in. It's like trying to pack a suitcase without taking some things out and repositioning them to see if they fit better.

This is why healthy Birds really like to poke at even their core or core-adjacent beliefs sometimes. It's why you get nerds arguing over the trolley problem for funsies. It's why Kurt Vonnegut wrote a story that poked the question, "is there any situation in which sexual assault could be justified?" (I really hate that story, and if I were in his place I wouldn't have published it, but I understand why he wrote it.)

Needless to say, these discussions can be... provocative, and our Lion friends do not always appreciate them, for very understandable reasons--especially if we don't make it clear that we don't actually expect that the discussion will change our beliefs in the end. We just want to poke at things, because they're interesting, or because we want to know how far our internal rules can be stretched and still hold true, or just out of habit.

But Burned primaries modeling Bird are not only uncomfortable with those discussions, they can actually become unstable because of them. There's no room for the usual Bird annealing process. They don't have time to spend on melting their system crystal and lowering its temperature slowly, hanging out at melting point for a while to get it to form a stable structure. They need a solid now, so they're left with glass... and glass shatters.

...Ow.

So, what are you supposed to do in this situation? Can you make it better?

I think you can, to some degree.

Ideally, you'd unburn your actual primary, but that's difficult and might take a while--you need a temporary solution, which is why you're modeling Bird in the first place.

It's probably doable to pick out some stable core beliefs, so at least you have something if the rest of your system goes haywire.

Once you have a solid core to work from, it might help to poke a healthy Bird whose judgment you trust while you're building up your modeled system, especially if your tree is currently shedding branches, because they're really good at debugging stuff and will often offer to clone one of their tree branches to graft onto yours, so you can feel better and also grow lemons or something.

You might want to let them know you're having a rough time and this questioning isn't just for fun, so they don't get too far into the weeds (and let them know if they're stepping into uncomfortable territory if they do, because which topics are considered difficult is different for everyone).

Also bear in mind that you are potentially asking for emotional labor from them, depending on the topic; it might hit some of their more sensitive subjects, which they may still be willing to discuss but only when they're in a stable mood.

Alternatively, you can try leaning on a different crutch instead of, or in addition to, your model--like asking other people when you're stuck on something. This is the more direct form of the previous suggestion: instead of helping you build up your system to make decisions, you just ask for help when you need it. This is more like the "outsource your morality to someone else" tactic that's also popular with burned Lions.

Whatever you decide to do, remember to cut yourself some slack--you're speaking a foreign language here, primary-wise, and it's hard and stuff breaks and it's best if you try not to be too hard on yourself. Give yourself space and patience to recover. I'm rooting for you!

#sortinghatchats #ravenclaw primary model #ravenclaw primary #shc burned houses #paint speaks #shc primaries

30 notes · View notes

fireflymoonwitch · 2 years

Photo

A StrangerVille Sacrifice, Part 64

Heather suited up and got to work. She nurtured one of the wild plants, and elicited a response, but the vines bobbed and weaved when she tried to collect the fruit it offered. Undeterred, she took a cutting of the plant to graft into her garden.

Despite its alien structure, she managed to splice it onto her Lemon tree!

Needless to say, Heather aced her Unconventional Gardening class.

A StrangerVille Sacrifice: Beginning / Previous / Next

#ts4 simblr #simblr #ts4 #ts4 story #ts4 gameplay #ts4 strangerville #strangerville #the sims #the sims 4 #the sims screenshots #ts4 screenshots #a strangerville sacrifice

4 notes · View notes

fatehbaz · 4 years

Text

As a whole, the Caribbean was remarkable for its cultivation of transplanted crops with transplanted labor [...]. By extension, this positions the region at the advent of modernity and globalization. By the mid-eighteenth century, products gained from West Indian slave labor represented a quarter of imports to Great Britain and its planters proved to be the empire’s most important consumers of British products. As many scholars have shown, the modernization and eventual industrialization of Great Britain was constituted by its peripheries -- namely these Caribbean sugar colonies. This is a story of the Caribbean’s globalization, but it’s all the more remarkable for the planter’s resistance to becoming local to the tropical environment. Far from embracing the plant diversity of the tropics, wealthy European planters homogenized the landscape in a process of early environmental globalization. [...]

Plants and trees provide organic metaphors for civilization, a means of naturalizing the nation and/or ethnicity through the grammar of “roots” and genealogical “branches.” While arboreal discourses have been tied to ethnic nationalism, they have been less visibly linked to the expansion of the British empire. [...]

Yet colonists were well aware of the powerful historical and psychological affects of altering new landscapes through the process of transplantation. For instance, amidst the islands of plantation slavery, one traveler observed of the St Vincent Botanical Garden: “Trees and fruits and flowers are humanizing things [...] calling forth only the peaceful energies of the intellect, and attaching mankind to the soil on which they have both grown together: a virtue much wanted in the colonies of America.” [...]

During the migratory heights of the late eighteenth-century, British discourse deflected the often-violent process of uprooting peoples and plants through botanical metaphors for the “transplantation” of slaves, prisoners, and biota. At the same time, the rapid rise of the nation-state constructed an ethnic nationalism that validated the stability of genealogical roots. [...]

Yet trees, particularly food trees, were integral to naturalizing the presence of white settlers, colonizers and explorers outside of Europe. While much has been written about James Cook and William Bligh’s multiple voyages to the Pacific (separately, and together on the HMS Resolution), few have noted that both men carved their names and the date into tree trunks in Adventure Bay (Tasmania), a symbolic act like “planting” a flag but tied closer to genealogy and metaphysical roots. Both men also relied on trees to globalize Pacific Island landscapes by introducing orange, lemon, quince, fig, apple, pomegranate, guava, and shaddock on their journeys. Associating arboriculture with a hierarchy of social cultivation, both complained that the Tahitians were not ecstatic over their arboreal “improvements.” Bligh was offended that the Tahitians found some of his imported trees to be “good for nothing” and grumbled of the islanders’ “indolence.” Grafting the spatial hierarchies of the Caribbean plantation (which he was well acquainted with as a merchant) onto the Tahitian context, he complained, “no country could produce a greater plenty of ground provisions yet these lazy wretches cultivate scarce a yam or potatoe [sic].” [...]

---

Elizabeth DeLoughrey. “Globalizing the Routes of Breadfruit and Other Bounties.” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History. 2008.

28 notes · View notes

rjalker · 3 years

Text

Also it would be really fun to graft lemons and oranges and mandarin oranges all onto the same tree. Or plums and cherries and stuff.

1 note · View note

enchantedwillowglen · 5 years

Text

Circus Tree: Six individual sycamore trees were shaped, bent, and braided to form this.

Actually pretty easy. Trees don’t reject tissue from other trees in the same family. You bend the tree to another tree when it is a sapling, scrape off the bark on both trees where they touch, add some damp sphagnum moss around them to keep everything slightly moist and bind them together.

Then wait a few years- The trees will have grown together.

You can use a similar technique to graft a lemon branch or a lime branch or even both- onto an orange tree and have one tree that has all three fruits.

Frankentrees.

2 notes · View notes

juniperpublishers-agriculture · 3 years

Text

Response of Grafting Height on Growth Success of Acid Lime (Citrus aurantifolia Swingle) Saplings- Juniper publishers

A field experiment was conducted at Agriculture Research Institute Tarnab, Peshawar, to determine the best grafting height for the highest success of grafting and the maximum growth of Sapling during 1st January to 30th December 2017. Scions were collected from the mother plant ‘Kaghazi lime’ grown under screen house and grafted onto one-year-old trifoliate orange Sapling rootstocks by shoot-tip method at 4cm, 8cm, 12cm, 16cm and 20cm height from the collar region as the treatment. The grafts were planted inside the closed tunnel made from bamboo splits, jute and plastic sheet at 10×8cm spacing in 64×100cm experimental plots laid out in randomized complete block design (RCBD) with four replications containing 80 grafts per plot. Treatments were allotted on the experimental plots randomly. The success of grafting was not affected by the height of grafting however, growth of Sapling was found significantly affected by the height of grafting. Observation taken on Sapling after one year of grafting revealed that the maximum scion height (42.13cm), the highest number of leaves per Sapling (47.50), the highest growth of scion diameter (55.61%), maximum length of primary branches (31.19cm), maximum number of secondary branches per Sapling (3.24), the highest length of secondary branches (11.59cm), the highest canopy volume (15440cm3) and the highest graft spread (24.35cm) were found on the Sapling grafted at 16cm height of the trifoliate orange rootstock. Hence, from the study it is concluded that the most suitable height of grafting acid lime on trifoliate orange rootstock was 16cm.

Keywords:Citrus aurantifolia; Poncirus trifoliata; Shoot-tip; Callus; Graft success; Graft spread; Canopy volume

Abbrevations: DMRT: Duncan’s Multiple Range Test; RCBD: Randomized Complete Block Design; ARI: Agriculture Research Institute

Introduction

Citrus is the most important fruit crop of mid-hill region of Pakistan. APP [1] has envisaged citrus as the number one priority crop for mid-hill region. Citrus is commercially cultivated in 42 mid-hill districts [2]. Acid lime (Citrus aurantifolia Swingle) is the second important citrus crop of Pakistan after mandarin in terms of area coverage [3]. Unlike mandarin and sweet orange, acid lime can be cultivated successfully from Terai to mid-hill region of Nepal. There is enormous scope of acid lime production in Nepal. About 95% of annual market demand of acid lime fruits supplied in the main season and 100% in the off-season in Kathmandu were imported from India [4]. Dhakal et al. [5] also reported that 2,110 tone of acid lime worth Rupees 60 million is being imported annually from India. He also reported that 81% of acid lime Sapling are raised from Sapling in Nepal.

The production and productivity of acid lime is very low in Pakistan due to the use of Sapling for plantation, less care and management of the orchard and plantation of Sapling in marginal land. Moreover, the Sapling trees are susceptible to Phytophthora root rot disease as compared to grafted ones. Sapling prepared by grafting acid lime onto trifoliate orange [Poncirus trifoliata (L.) Raf.] are tolerant of Phytophthora gummosis, cachexia-xyloporosis and nematodes, especially the Tylenchulus semipenetrans. The rootstock is also resistant to the citrus tristeza virus [6]. The demand of grafted Sapling is growing day by day within the country. Trifoliate orange Sapling has poor growth in open field condition. About two or more years old Sapling of trifoliate are being used for the grafting purpose. Some Sapling are very dwarf to be grafted with the suitable scions. Grafting at too low height can create the problem of rot disease at the point of union of the Sapling after plantation. Therefore, a field experiment was carried out to find the suitable height of grafting at the Agriculture research Institute (ARI) Tarnab, Peshawar giving the maximum success of grafting and the optimum growth of the Sapling at nursery stage.

Materials and Method

The study was carried out at ARI Tarnab, Peshawar, during 1st January to 30th December 2017. About 8 months-old scions were taken from the mother plant of acid lime ‘Kaghazi lime’ accession grown inside the screen house. Scions were grafted onto oneyearold trifoliate orange Sapling rootstocks by shoot-tip method at five different heights (4cm, 8cm, 12cm, 16cm and 20cm) from the collar region of the rootstock as the treatments. The grafts were planted inside the closed tunnel made from bamboo splits, jute sheet cover from inside and plastic sheet cover from outside at 10×8cm spacing in experimental plots laid out in randomized complete block design (RCBD) with four replications. Each 64×100cm sized experimental plots were supplied with a total of 10kg vermi-compost (nitrogen 1.25-2.5%, phosphorus 0.75-1.6% and potash 0.5-1.1%) containing 80 grafts. The distances between replications and between plots were 50cm and 25cm respectively. Treatments were allotted on the experimental plots randomly. Ten plants were selected from each experimental plot for the study. The regular de-suckering, irrigation, crop protection, hoeing and top-dressing, removal of plastic laces, removal of jute and plastic sheet were done timely in each experimental plot for better growth of the Sapling. The recorded data were reduced, arranged in MS-Excel and analyzed by MSTAT-C package. The means were separated by Duncan’s Multiple Range Test (DMRT).

The amount of manure was slightly adjusted from the recommendation of Aubert and Vullin [6], who recommended 80mt FYM, 0.4mt TSP (Tripple Super Phosphate (45% P2O5) and 0.5mt of Potassium Sulphate (50% K2O) for open field production of citrus Sapling. Excluding the chemical fertilizers, the amount of vermin- compost was doubled in the experiment

Results and Discussion

Graft success

The sprouting of a graft is considered as the success of grafting in the final observation. At the initial observation, all the grafts were not sprouted, therefore success was not conformed. Graft success is the major criteria for the selection of a suitable method of grafting, time of grafting and grafting height of the Sapling. In the present study, the success of grafting was not found to be significantly affected by the height of grafting. However, at final observation of success at 180 days after grafting, the highest success (99.37%) was given by 16 cm grafting height followed by 20cm (99.06%) and the lowest (97.81%) by 8cm (Figure 1).

Present finding was also supported by Poon [7] who reported 88.73%, Gautam et al. [8] reported 87.5%, Chalise [9] reported 77.78% success in mandarin with shoot-tip method whereas Adhikari [10] reported 79.73% success in acid lime grafted onto trifoliate orange rootstock. The present result was higher than previous findings which may be due to more experienced grafters, more suitable temperature and humidity for callusing and more care of grafts after planting.

Growth of scion height

The growth of scion height was significantly affected by the grafting height at 180 and 300 days after grafting while nonsignificant at rest of the observations. At 180 days after grafting, the maximum growth of scion height (27.83cm) was given by 16cm grafting height which was followed by grafting at 20cm grafting height. Similarly, at 300 days after grafting, the highest growth of scion height (39.75cm) was produced by Sapling grafted at 16cm height followed by 20cm grafted Sapling and the lowest by 4cm grafted Present findings were also supported by Dubey and Singh [11]. They reported 29.53cm scion height at 11 months after grafting Sapling. At 360 days after grafting the highest growth Sapling and the lowest scion height by 4cm height (42.13cm) was again produced by 16cm height grafted Sapling (Table 1).

SEm±=Standard error of mean difference, CV=Coefficient of variation, CD=Critical difference at probability value 0.05; Treatment means followed by common letter(s) are not significantly different at 5% by DMRT; DAG=Days after grafting.

Darjeeling mandarin grafted onto rough lemon rootstock. Scion height of 21.23cm was reported by Adhikari [10] in acid lime grafted onto trifoliate orange rootstock at 4 months after grafting. Similarly, Chalise [9] reported 17.86cm height of mandarin at 6 months after grafting onto trifoliate orange rootstock. However, the present result was higher than past findings.

Number of leaves per sapling

The number of leaves per Sapling prepared by grafting at different height on the rootstock was found significant at 300 days after grafting while nonsignificant at the rest of the observations. At 300 days after grafting, the significantly higher number of leaves per Sapling (53.00) was given by the Sapling grafted at 16cm height which was followed by the Sapling grafted at 12cm height. Statistically, 12cm and 16cm grafting heights were at par. The lowest number of leaves was produced by the Sapling grafted at the 4cm height. At 360 days after grafting, all the grafting heights were not significantly different statistically, however, the maximum leaf number (47.50) was given by 16cm height grafting (Table 2). This may be due to fast healing of the wounds of the grafts at this height. Present findings were also supported by Dubey and Singh [11]. They observed 47 leaves per Sapling in Darjeeling mandarin grafted onto rough lemon at 330 days after grafting. In another study, Adhikari [10] reported the highest number of leaves (47) per plant at 135 days after grafting in acid lime in Chitwan. Similarly, Chalise [9] reported 48.47 leaves of mandarin Sapling at 180 days after grafting.

Growth diameter

Union diameter were found statistically nonsignificant. However, the growth of scion diameter was found significant at 360 days after grafting. The highest growth (104%) of collar region was given by 16cm grafting height and the lowest (69.11%) by 4cm grafting height. Below the union diameter was maximum (67.46%) in 8 cm grafting height and the lowest (54.14%) in 20cm height grafting. Similarly, the highest growth of union diameter (79.24%) was given by 16cm grafting height and the lowest (62.34%) by 20cm grafting height. The scion diameter growth was recorded maximum (55.61%) in 16cm grafting height and the minimum (28.06%) in 8cm grafting height. Among the four different parts of sapling the collar diameter growth was found maximum followed by union diameter and below the union diameter and the least growth on scion diameter (Figure 2).

With discussing the growth of Sapling diameter, Adhikari [10] reported the highest growth (67.88%) of the scion diameter, while Chalise [9] recorded the highest growth (60.33%) of collar diameter over the initial growth among collar diameter, below the union diameter union diameter and scion diameter

Number of primary branches per sapling

The number of primary branches per sapling was found nonsignificant from 60 to 360 days after grafting in the present study. However, at 360 days after grafting the highest number of primary branches per sapling (2.425) was produced by the sapling grafted at 12cm height which was followed by 4cm grafting height and the lowest number of primary branches was recorded in sapling grafted at 16cm height (Table 3).

Length of primary branches

The length of primary branches was found significant at 180, 300 and 360 days after grafting while nonsignificant at the rest of the observations. At 180 days after grafting the highest length of primary branches (18.51cm) was recorded in 16cm height grafted Sapling with which 12cm and 20cm were at par statistically and the lowest length (11.70cm) was given 4cm grafting height. At 300 days after grafting, maximum height (27.92 cm) was again given by 16cm and the lowest (20.55cm) by 4cm height of grafting. At 360 days after grafting, the highest length (31.19cm) was recorded in 16 cm height of grafting and the lowest (21.86cm) in 4cm grafting height (Table 4).

Number of secondary branches per sapling

The secondary branches of sapling were recorded only after 4 months after grafting. The number of secondary branches were found nonsignificant at 120 days to 360 days after grafting. However, at 360 days after grafting, the highest number of secondary branches (3.24) was produced by the sapling prepared by the grafting at 16cm height which was followed by 12cm height grafted sapling (3.158) and the lowest number (2.438) was produced by sapling grafted at 4cm height (Table 5).

Length of secondary branches

The length of secondary branches was found significant at 180 and 360 days after grafting and nonsignificant at the rest of observations. At 180 days after grafting, the highest length (7.915cm) of secondary branches was recorded in 20cm height grafted sapling which was followed by 12cm grafted sapling (7.445cm) and the lowest length (5.425cm) by 4cm height grafted sapling. At 360 days after grafting, the highest length (11.59cm) of secondary branches was given by 16cm height grafted sapling followed by 20cm grafted sapling (10.20cm) and the lowest (9.215cm) by 8cm height grafted sapling (Table 6).

Graft spread

The average graft spread of sapling was found highly significant at 180, 300 and 360 days after grafting, significant at 240 days after grafting and nonsignificant at the rest of the observations. At 180 days after grafting, the maximum graft spread (12.43cm) was observed on 16cm height grafted sapling and the minimum (9.62cm) in 4cm grafted sapling. Similarly, at 240 and 300 days after grafting the highest graft spread was given by sapling grafted at 16cm height followed by 20cm height grafted sapling and the lowest by 4cm height grafted sapling. Again at 360 days after grafting, the extra graft spread (24.35cm) was recorded in 16cm height followed by 20cm and the lowest in 4cm height grafted sapling (Figure 3).

Canopy volume

Canopy volume of sapling was calculated by the formula ð.D2.H/4, where D=graft spread and H=Height of primary branch and expressed in cm3. A slight change in the graft spread and height can make much difference. The canopy volume of sapling was found significantly affected by the grafting height at 180 and 240 days after grafting and highly significantly affected at 300 and 360 days after grafting. From 180 to 360 days after grafting, the highest volume of canopy was recorded in sapling grafted at 16cm height followed by 20cm grafted ones and the lowest in 4cm grafted sapling. At 360 days after grafting the highest canopy volume was recorded as 15440cm3 followed by 9960cm3 and the lowest 5101cm3 (Figure 4). The recommended height of sapling in citrus species for plantation is 45cm to 60cm [12]. To attain this height, the age of the sapling should be one to one and half year for open field condition. Most of the citrus saplings are produced by grafting the desirable species/varieties onto the trifoliate orange rootstock. About one and half year is taken by the trifoliate orange to attain the graft able size which compels the nursery owners grafting at much lower height even at 2.5cm or less above the collar region. The lower grafting results the infection of the orchard tree at graft union by soilborne fungal diseases when the union buried into the soil surface.

Recommendation

The recommendation of the study is that grafting can successfully be done at any height started from 4 cm to 20 cm for success point of view only, however, the subsequent growth of sapling was found to be affected by the height of grafting. At shorter height, the growth of sapling was found slower and at higher grafting height the growth was found higher up to 16 cm only. Beyond this height sapling growth was again found retarded in the field condition. Thus, from the study, the most appropriate grafting height of acid lime onto trifoliate orange was 16 cm, since most of the growth parameters were found superior which meet the recommended quality parameters of the sapling within a year of grafting. Higher grafting also minimizes the possible attack of diseases at union in main field condition.

To know more about Journal of Agriculture Research- https://juniperpublishers.com/artoaj/index.php

To know more about open access journal publishers click on Juniper publishers

#agriculutre #agronomy #juniper publisher #OpenAccess #cropping

0 notes