Artificial pollination and fruit quality in red pitaya

Abstract

Native of the Americas, pitaya is currently a fruit bearing plant in expansion in the domestic and international market and is an alternative source of revenue for small and large farmers. As some studies show the lack of efficiency of natural pollinators in fructification in pitaya, the purpose of this study was to evaluate the efficiency of manual self-pollination and of manual cross pollination in Hylocereus undatus in two periods of pollination. The experiment was carried out in the orchard of the Universidade Federal de Lavras (Federal University of Lavras) in a completely randomized design with a 2 x 2 factorial arrangement (two types of pollination and two flowering periods) with 15 replications, with one flower per replication. The flowers were bagged, emasculated and pollinated manually. The percentage of fruit set , longitudinal and transversal diameter of the fruit, mass of the fruit, pulp and peel, thickness of the peel, soluble solids contents, pH, titratable acidity, ratio (soluble solids:titratable acidity), number of seeds per fruit and seed germination were evaluated. It may be concluded that pollination in red pitaya with its own pollen allows fructification. Flowers pollinated in Apr. result in fruit with physical characteristics superior to the fruit generated by pollination in Jan.

Yield capacity of six superior pitaya genotypes under edaphoclimatic conditions of the Federal District

“…Although the values for fruit length and diameter of the S. undatus in the present work were similar to the ones found in other papers, the total mass was higher than most of the studies available (CHIK et al, 2011;FERNANDES et al, 2018;MAGALHÃES et al, 2019;MENEZES et al, 2015a;MENEZES et al, 2015b;ORTIZ e TAKAHASHI, 2015;CORDEIRO et al, 2015;PATWARY et al, 2013;YAH et al, 2008). The average fruit mass for BRS Lua do Cerrado was 557.84 g and 602.61 g in the first and second year of evaluation, respectively, while the average values for BRS Luz do Cerrado regarding the MF was 566.34 g in the crop of 2019/2020 and 556.49 g in the crop of 2020/2021 (Table 1).…”