Economic and quality study of purple passion fruit grafted on a fusarium wilt tolerant rootstock

Abstract

The aim of this work was to determine the influence of Passiflora maliformis as rootstock on the physical characteristics of fruits, productivity, and profitability of the purple passion fruit. The study was carried out from May 2020 to April 2021, under a 3 × 3 factorial design distributed in blocks with three repetitions. The treatments were represented by three scions of elite accessions of purple passion fruit PutEdu01, TesEdu11 and a commercial scion, and three rootstocks, ungrafted, autografted and P. maliformis. Conventional cleft grafting was used. The fresh fruit mass, the shell weight, the pulp weight, the fruit diameter, the polar diameter of the fruit, the percentage of pulp and skin were evaluated. As economic variables, production costs, income, and their cost benefit ratio were determined. The quality of the fruits derived from the grafted accessions in P. maliformis was within the fresh marketing standards, presenting a pulp yield of more than 50%. The combinations of the purple passion fruit TesEdu11 accessions and the commercial one grafted onto P. maliformis as the elite accession PutEdu01 without grafting were financially attractive because they presented a cost-benefit ratio greater than one at two years after starting the crop.