Treatments of chemical and plant growth regulators on sapota fruit

Tsomu, Thupten
Dr. Thupten Tsomu born in Arunachal Pradesh. She completed her under graduate (B.Sc. Horticulture) degree from College of Horticulture and Forestry, Arunachal Pradesh during 2007-11. Awarded ICAR-JRF in 2011 and persued her post graduate degree (2011-13) and Ph.D. in Fruit Science (2013-17) from Anand Agricultural University, Anand, Gujarat, India.

Freshly harvested uniform sized sapota fruits were washed, cleaned and treated with CaCl2 10,000 and 5,000 mg/l for 5 minutes, GA3 150 and 300 mg/l for 10 minutes, kinetin 100 and 200 mg/l for 20 minutes and ethrel 1,000 and 2,000 mg/l for 5 minutes. Treated and untreated fruits were packed in card board cartons of 30 x 30 x 30 cm size with 6 vents each of 3 cm diameter equally on opposite sides and stored in the PG laboratory. The experiment was framed in Completely Randomized Design and repeated four times with eight treatments and a control. The fruits were subjected to various quantitative and qualitative analysis on 4th, 6th, 8th, 10th and 12th days of storage period. CaCl2 5000 mg/l was found best treatments which not only extended the shelf-life of sapota fruits but also reduced the post-harvest losses and increased fruit firmness, days taken to ripening, TSS, reducing, non reducing and total sugars and decreasing trend with respect to acidity.