What are the latest reasons for low fruit set in plums?

For farmers who grow plums, the most important thing in order to increase economic returns is to find a way to raise the fruit set rate, but many farmers' own plum orchards have extremely low fruit set rates. What causes this? Let's take a look together.

1. Improper variety selection

The growing environment of plants cultivated in greenhouses is clearly different from the outside, which means varieties that perform well when grown in the open field are not necessarily suitable for greenhouse cultivation. However, some farmers directly cover open-field varieties with a greenhouse and switch them to greenhouse cultivation, aiming to achieve early ripening and an early market launch. This is actually a wrong approach. Some open-field varieties, because of their high chilling requirement for overwintering, poor self-pollination ability, and vigorous vegetative growth, will show poor or excessive vegetative growth when cultivated in a greenhouse, resulting in many flowers but few fruits. For this problem, suitable varieties should be chosen according to one's own cultivation model.

2. Climatic reasons

Because spring temperatures are extremely unstable, with temperatures rising and falling suddenly, and late spring cold spells are also very likely to occur, such a climatic environment will have a great impact on the flowering and pollination of pear trees and may very likely lead to pollination failure. People cannot change climatic conditions, but this can be solved through greenhouse cultivation, and at this point attention must again be paid to variety selection.

3. Too few pollen-providing trees

Many people forget to increase the diversity of plum varieties when planting plums, so when the pollination season arrives, the plants do not have enough pollen to complete pollination. In this case, even if the fruit trees produce a large number of flowers, without fruit trees providing pollen for them, their fruit set rate will not increase. Therefore, during cultivation, pollinizer trees must be planted in a reasonable ratio so that pollination can proceed normally and the fruit set rate can be increased.

4. Unreasonable pruning

Pruning plums is meant to increase the ventilation and light penetration of the fruit trees and raise the fruit set rate, but if pruning is excessive, causing too few branches, then there will naturally be fewer fruiting branches, which will directly affect yield. However, if too many branches are retained, nutrients become too scattered, ventilation and light penetration are poor, small inner branches are likely to die, the fruiting position shifts outward, and yield also decreases. Therefore, reasonable pruning and maintaining an appropriate number of retained branches are important guarantees for high, stable yield and high quality.

  The above is an introduction to the reasons for low fruit set in plums. We hope it can help you. To learn more related knowledge, please keep following us.