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- Author or Editor: Lorenzo León x
- HortScience x
The duration of the juvenile period (JP) before the seedlings reach the adult phase (AP) and begin flowering is the major impediment for fruit breeding in olive. In this work, the effect of soil solarization on the growth and duration of the JP of olive seedlings was studied. Seedlings obtained from open pollination of ‘Manzanilla de Sevilla’ and from crosses between ‘Arbequina’ × ‘Arbosana’ and ‘Picual’ × ‘Koroneiki’ were tested. Solarization treatment consisted on covering the soil around the trees for 3 years by black plastic film in a split-plot design with the three progenies as the main factor and solarization/not solarization as the secondary factor. Solarization resulted in both higher soil temperature and soil moisture in solarized plots with respect to non-solarized. Significant differences between crosses were found for plant vigor and flowering measurements throughout the experiment. Soil solarization increased trunk diameter and the number of seedlings reaching AP in ‘Manzanilla’ open progeny. A positive effect of solarization on flowering index was also observed in ‘Picual’ × ‘Koroneiki’ progenies. These results suggest that soil solarization may be recommended as a tool for shortening the duration of the JP and thus accelerating the selection process in olive breeding programs.
The initial results of a comparative field trial of the first 15 selections of the olive (Olea europaea L.) breeding program of Cordoba, Spain, are presented. These selections came from crosses among ‘Arbequina’, ‘Frantoio’, and ‘Picual’ that were also included in the trial as controls. The trial was planted in July 2001 in a randomized block design with 16 replications and was systematically evaluated for earliness of bearing, vigor, crop, and yield efficiency from 2001 to 2005. Significant differences among selections were found for all characters measured. A greater proportion of early-bearing genotypes than in previous cultivar collections were found, whereas mean accumulated yield was similar to former evaluations. Therefore, the shorter unproductive period obtained in this work seems to indicate that the selection of seedlings for a short juvenile period has provided a shorter unproductive period of the subsequent new cultivars. No correlation between vigor at the seedling stage and vigor in the corresponding adult vegetative propagated selection was found. If the data presented here are confirmed further, some early-bearing cultivars could be suggested as new olive cultivars, the first obtained by cross-breeding in Spain. Additionally, some of them also show a low vigor and could be adapted to high-density hedgerow orchards.
In recent years, the juvenile period of olive seedlings has been reduced by diverse forcing and pruning-formation techniques, but it is still a major drawback for breeding. Plant height at the time when seedlings are transplanted to the field has been found effective for obtaining earlier flowering, but the value of this parameter varies widely among olive breeding programs. We evaluated different transplant dates, taking into account mean plant height and age, with the aim of determining the optimum parameters for achieving early flowering and easy plant management and, at the same time, for the early elimination of genotypes with a long juvenile period. A mean seedling height of ≈100 cm at the time of planting in the field provided the best results in terms of shortening the juvenile period and facilitating handling of the seedlings. For all dates tested, seedling height at transplanting was effective as a pre-selection criterion for the early elimination of genotypes with long juvenile periods, with slight improvement in effectiveness with advancing transplant date.
A first attempt to determine the effect of vigor and parents on the length of the juvenile period of olive seedlings is here reported. Vigor seems to have a significant influence on the percentage of flowering seedlings, especially in the first 2 years of bearing. The different parents used have produced differences in the juvenile period of their descendants. A correspondence between the length of the unproductive period of the parents and the length of the juvenile period that they transmit to their descendants has been observed. The seedling forcing growth protocol described here has been able to produce flowering seedlings 28 months after germination, with >93% of seedlings flowering 65 months after germination.