Articles
APRICOT SELECTION AT THE HORTICULTURAL FACULTY IN LEDNICE
The common aim is to reach a high, regular and best-quality production, the extention of the harvest season and tolerance to the main diseases.
Standard breeding techniques were used: controled hybridization, open-pollination, self-pollination, clonal selection.
Breeding plans, mainly based on mid-european apricot culivars and hybrids, also included foreign cultivars from USA, former USSR, China.
The clonal selection aimed especially at the standard cultivar ‘Velkopavlovická’ (type of ‘Hungarian Best’). Two cycles of clonal selection of this cultivar were finished and registered in the Czech republic.
Since the beginning of the breeding programme more than 12 000 hybrids have been evaluated from the first step.
The best 400 genotypes were chosen for a multilocal trial.
At the present time 16 hybrids are reported in state cultivar testing, 5 of them are in law protection and released since 1991: ‘Leskora’, ‘Lejuna’, ‘Ledana’, ‘Lebona’, ‘Leala’.