Alwyn van der Merwe, production director of ALG Estates near Citrusdal -- 200km north of Cape Town -- said on Wednesday the new fruit has proven not only to be sweeter than normal oranges, but will also lengthen the season by at least three weeks."Year after year the farm has been struck by a troop of baboons which descended from the mountains," van der Merwe said. "The troop always selected one tree amongst thousands of trees in one of our orchards and devoured all the fruit before our season really got going. At closer inspection we discovered that the brix [sweetness grade] of this particular minneola, a soft citrus variety, was much higher than the rest of the orchard and that it started bearing fruit at least three weeks earlier than expected."
The farmers set about grafting some shoots of this tree onto standard root stock and passed it on the Citrus Growers Association (CGA) at Uitenhage where the trees are now being multiplied in greenhouse tunnels. It was clearly a case of a spontaneous mutation in the orchard, which would have gone unnoticed were it not for the baboons.
Source: Sapa
No comments:
Post a Comment