Effect of GA3 and Micronutrients on Fruit Drop, Cracking and Quality Attributes of Litchi cv. Dehradun

Abstract

The study was conducted at the Horticulture Garden, Department of Fruit Science, Chandra Shekhar Azad University of Agriculture and Technology, Kanpur. The research spanned six months from January to June 2024. The experiment was conducted using 10 treatments viz., T1-GA3 @ 20 ppm, T2-GA3 @ 40 ppm, T3-GA3 @ 60 ppm, T4-ZnSO4 @ 0.4%, T5-ZnSO4 @ 0.6%, T6-ZnSO4 @ 0.8%, T7-Borax @ 0.2%, T8-Borax @ 0.4%, T9-Borax @ 0.6% and T10-Control (Water spray), which were replicated thrice in Randomized Block Design. The findings of the experiment clearly show that the foliar spray of 0.4% borax significantly influenced fruit set (62.05%), fruit drop (40.98%), fruit retention (59.02%), fruit cracking (5.90%), length of fruit (3.98cm), diameter of fruit (2.80cm), fruit weight (12.18g), pulp weight (8.04g), fresh seed weight (2.09g), peel weight (1.79g), pulp: stone ratio (3.97), total soluble solid (19.45%), total sugar (18.32%) and titratable acidity (0.43%)contents in the north Indian plains.