Detailed Explanation of High-Yield Cultivation Techniques for Schisandra chinensis

To achieve high yield and high efficiency in the artificial cultivation of Schisandra chinensis, three key aspects must first be addressed: first, variety selection, purification and improvement must be carried out; second, a period of domestication and adaptation is required; third, pruning must be intensified to regulate and control tree vigor. These three aspects complement each other and none can be omitted.

As early as more than 20 years ago, many farmers in our county tried cultivating Schisandra chinensis one after another, but all ultimately failed. The Kuandian County Schisandra chinensis Improved Variety Breeding Base also began experiments in 1985, but the first two attempts were also unsuccessful. In 1993, they summarized the reasons for the two failures and restarted their research experiments. Based on the principle that crossbreeding (inbreeding) between superior varieties (lines) of fruit trees such as grapes and pears tends to produce "transgressive segregation in progeny," they first carried out variety selection, purification, domestication and improvement of wild Schisandra chinensis. The main approach was as follows: select a patch of wild Schisandra chinensis on the mountain, and when the fruit ripens, select plants with long, neat fruit clusters, large, compact and uniform berries, and excellent comprehensive traits as breeding parent trees to retain, while removing all other inferior plants. In the following year during the flowering period, measures such as cross-plant (flower) pollination and reciprocal repeated pollination were applied to the retained parent trees to breed superior seeds. The second step was to grow the obtained seeds into seedlings in open flat ground, then directly transplant them into flat ground, and carry out open-field cultivation and domestication under full sunlight conditions, so that they gradually adapt to high-temperature and drought environments. After the trees bear fruit, their seeds are harvested and used for raising seedlings for large-scale establishment of new commercial orchards. The superior varieties bred by this method have significantly enhanced stress resistance; they do not wilt even under high-temperature and drought weather, and continue growing normally without rain for half a month. Third, attention must be paid to pruning. While transplanting the young seedlings, the main trunk should be cut off at a low position to force the seedlings to sprout 3-4 main vines from the base as quickly as possible. Thereafter, based on the principle of combining "long pruning" with "short cutting," pruning should be as light as possible, so that the branches and vines quickly cover the trellis surface, expand the fruiting branch groups, and lower the fruiting position.

In addition to the above three key measures, they also simultaneously adopted auxiliary measures such as appropriate close planting, mulching the tree disc with grass, applying boron at the flowering stage, and artificial pollination, which produced very obvious results. It was calculated that a 5-year-old fruiting orchard had a yield of 225 kg per mu (667 sq m), and the yield of 6-7-year-old orchards stabilized at 240 kg per mu, which is 3-4 times higher than that of wild varieties without selection and improvement.