Coconut

Selection Of Seed Material

Selection Of Mother Palms

• Even in selected gardens mother palms for the collection of seednuts have to be marked out on the basis of yield, copra content per nut, size and shape of nuts, nature of the crown, age of the palm, etc.

Yield

• The annual yield of good ripe nuts is the most important criterion for the selection of mother palms.
• The trees should be regular and heavy bearers, i.e., they should yield heavy crops every year instead of in alternate years.
• In India, an average annual yield of not less than 80 nuts and preferably 100 nuts per tree is considered necessary for a mother palm.
• As the number of nuts and weight of copra are highly correlated, there is little danger in taking the number of nuts produced as giving an idea of the copra yield, though the number of nuts and weight of husked nuts provide the best standards of selection.
• The most satisfactory way to judge the yielding capacity of a tree is to keep a complete and permanent record of nuts harvested from each individual tree at every harvest as is being done in some of the coconut research stations in India and the Coconut Research Institute of Ceylon.
• Certain characters of the coconut palm such as length of stem and number of leaves in the crown have also been shown to give an approximate idea of the bearing capacity of trees, provided the palms grow under similar conditions, receive identical treatment and are of the same age.
• A high yielding mother palm in its middle age will have at any time 30 to 40 fully opened leaves in its crown.

Shape of the crown

• The massive crown of the tree which is the most conspicuous part of the palm, is composed of leaves in the different stages of growth and spadices developing in the leaf axils.
• According to the disposition of the leaves in the crown it can roughly be grouped into four classes, viz., spherical, semi-spherical, drooping and erect.
• Among these, the first two are the best, as the disposition of the leaves is such that the bunches will have sufficient room for normal development and will be fully supported by the leaf petioles.
• When the crown is of the drooping type the bunches are likely to slip down, break the inflorescence stalk and shed the nuts in the immature stage.
• Trees with drooping or erect crowns should be avoided even if they show other desirable characters.

Nature of petiole and inflorescence stalks

• The petioles should be short and stout and be able to give effective support to the coconut bunches.
• The bunch stalks should also be short and strong and not have any tendency to droop down

Size and shape of nuts

• Other conditions being the same, trees having medium-sized nuts with nearly round or spherical shape are better than the others for selection as mother palms.
• Such trees not only give high yields but the nuts also contain, in general, more copra than the others.

Weight of bunches and nuts

• There is some advantage in selecting trees which bear large number of heavy nuts in a bunch.

Defective trees

• Trees producing habitually barren nuts, i.e., nuts which are empty or do not contain well developed kernel inside or those that shed their nuts before they attain full maturity are to be discarded at the time of selection of mother palms even though such trees may give high yields.

Situation

• Trees growing close to houses, cattle sheds, compost heaps, etc., may be avoided as it is difficult to differentiate under such conditions palms which are inherently good from those whose performance is solely due to the favourable conditions.

Age of the mother palm

• There is some difference of opinion regarding the age of the palm to be selected for the collection of seednuts.
• Theoretically the age of the palm should make no difference on the quality of its offspring.
• In certain important coconut tracts of India, growers prefer to gather seednuts from old palms whose previous history they know well.
• Again, good palms have not infrequently been raised from seednuts gathered from young palms that have not reached the full bearing stage.
• One of the reasons for suggesting that middleaged trees are the best for selection as mother palms is that during that age, the trees will be in their prime of life and one can easily spot out really good yielders from mediocre or poor ones.
• If the trees are young or old, the assumption regarding their performance can very largely go wrong.
• Under normal conditions, palms between 25 and 60 years of age would have reached the full bearing stage and can be selected as mother palms.

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