BREEDING AND CULTURAL PRACTICES TO IMPROVE MANGO ‘LIPPENS’ IN THE CANARY ISLANDS

Mango is the third tropical fruit crop, after banana and avocado, in the Canary Islands.
Recent work has been focussed on breeding and cultural techniques to improve fruit size in ‘Lippens’, the main cultivar of the islands.
Breeding started with the selection of material coming from self-pollinated ‘Lippens’ seedlings. 1554 seedlings were planted in a field trial selecting five of them based on fruit characteristics.
This material was grafted on the commonly used rootstock Gomera-1, and planted in a semi-commercial trial for its agronomic evaluation.
Fruit thinning trials involved 12-year-old Lippens trees grafted on Gomera1 with three treatments: 1) removal of 40% of the panicles, 2) thinning to 3 fruits per panicle; and 3) no thinning (control). The results show that thinning to 3 fruits per panicle increases fruit size, which seems to indicate that this characteristic in this cultivar is more dependent on number of fruits per panicle than on the total tree fruit load.

VIII International Mango Symposium

M.J. Grajal Martín, P.M. Hernández Delgado, V. Galán Saúco, D. Fernández Galván

Mangifera indica L., improvement, selection, thinning, fruit quality

https://doi.org/10.17660/ActaHortic.2009.820.16