Healthy Saplings – Key to Sustainable Pomegranate Production

Author: N.V. Singh, Omkar Salunkhe, Chandrakant Awachare, Unnati Salutgi, Bhavya Sharma, Shilpa Parashuram and R.A. Marathe

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Abstract

Pomegranate is a commercial fruit crop of semi-arid regions of the world. It is an ancient fruit crop in modern horticulture catering nutritional, nutraceutical and livelihood needs of its stakeholders. During recent years, the crop has gained tremendous popularity due to its versatile adaptability, hardy nature, nutritional and industrial values. The many-folds increment in the pomegranate acreage globally demands large scale availability of elite planting material. India alone needs about 15 million healthy saplings annually to match the pace of pomegranate expansion in the country. The challenges like pomegranate bacterial blight and wilt, which are many-a-times transmitted to distant places through infected saplings or potting mixture (wilt complex) causing severe crop losses thus are major threats for the sustainable pomegranate production. The situation warrants large scale production of QPM to avoid spread of these diseases and ensure sustained profit in pomegranate cultivation. To meet the progressively increasing healthy sapling requirement in pomegranate, the conventional commercial propagation methods like stem cuttings and air layering must be upgraded with standard sanitation nursery management protocols to ensure healthy sapling production and the emerging commercial propagation methods like micropropagation needs to be promoted. The research on screening of wild pomegranate germplasm and the utilization of promising ones as roots tocks should be intensified and larger scale field trials on grafted plants should be taken up under different pomegranate growing regions to meet the vision of climate smart pomegranate production system in near future.

Keywords

Pomegranate Propagation, Air layering, Stem Cuttings, Grafting and Budding

Conclusion

The foundation for ensuring sustained profitable yield in pomegranate is the use of quality planting material from the certified source for establishing orchards. The acreage under pomegranate in expanding and so the disease and pests and many of them are spreading through infected planting material. Thus, there is an urgent need to multiply true-to-the type planting material following standard propagation methods, proper sanitation and nursery management protocols. The commercial propagation methods namely, air layering, stem cutting and micropropagation should be utilized to meet the increasing requirement of healthy planting material with strong regulatory framework. The research on exploitation of rootstocks for climate resilient pomegranate production system needs to be up scaled and intensified.

References

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How to cite this article

N.V. Singh, Omkar Salunkhe, Chandrakant Awachare, Unnati Salutgi, Bhavya Sharma, Shilpa Parashuram and R.A. Marathe (2022). Healthy Saplings – Key to Sustainable Pomegranate Production. Biological Forum – An International Journal, 14(4): 1188-1194.