Harvest maturity for low chill cultivars of peach under mid hill conditions of Himachal Pradesh Rana V. S., Mishra L.N., Thakur D. S., Sharma Sunny*, Kumar Vijay, Pawar Ravina Department of Fruit Science, Dr. YSP UHF, Nauni, Solan173230, HP, India *Corresponding author: sunnsharma141@gmail.com
Online published on 1 October, 2022. Abstract The experiment was laid out on 10 years old plants of four commercial low chill cultivars namely; Tropic Sweet, Early Grande, Florida Prince and Pratap. The whole program of study was split into two experiments. First experiment was carried out in Randomized Block Design (RBD) for standardization of optimum harvest maturity for these cultivars. The second experiment was conducted to elucidate the relative storage performance of peach cultivars, harvested at different maturity levels for one week at ambient temperature. Among different maturity indices, days from full bloom (DFFB), fruit colour, TSS and Total sugars were found to be the most reliable indices of maturity for low chill cultivars understudy. On the basis of physico-chemical characteristics and storage behaviour of fruits for one week at ambient temperature, 102 DFFB for Tropic Sweet, 93 DFFB for Early Grande, 87 DFFB for Florida Prince and 89 DFFB for Pratap were adjudged as the optimum harvest dates. Top Keywords Prunus persica, Maturity, Low-chill cultivars, Physiological weight Loss. Top |