Horticulture, Vegetable and Fruit Production
This section tests horticultural divisions, propagation methods, orchard calculations and Maharashtra's commercial fruit and vegetable belts.
Core rules
- Divisions: pomology (fruits), olericulture (vegetables), floriculture (flowers), plantation crops (coconut, cashew, arecanut), spices and medicinal plants.
- Propagation: sexual (seed) and asexual - cutting, layering, grafting, budding. In grafting, the scion gives the shoot and fruit, the rootstock gives roots and often disease or soil tolerance. Mango is grafted (approach, veneer, stone); citrus is budded (T or shield budding); guava and pomegranate are aired-layered or cuttage.
- Training builds the framework; pruning removes unwanted growth. Bahar treatment in grapes uses pruning to fix the harvest season: April pruning for the October crop, October pruning for the summer crop.
- Orchard layout: square, rectangular, hexagonal, quincunx. High-density planting uses closer spacing for more early yield.
- Maharashtra belts: Alphonso mango in Ratnagiri and Sindhudurg, Kesar in Jalna and Aurangabad, grapes and onion in Nashik, pomegranate (Bhagwa) in Solapur, banana in Jalgaon, strawberry in Mahabaleshwar.
Worked example
How many mango plants are needed for one hectare at 5 m × 5 m spacing? Reasoning: area per plant = 25 m²; one hectare = 10,000 m². Plants = 10,000 ÷ 25 = 400 plants per hectare. At 4 m × 4 m it would be 10,000 ÷ 16 = 625 plants, a higher-density planting with earlier returns but greater management demand.
Traps that cost marks
- Reversing scion and rootstock.
- Using plant spacing in metres with area in square metres wrongly, or forgetting 1 ha = 10,000 m².
- Confusing training with pruning.
- Saying grapes are propagated mainly by seed.