Secrets of High-Yield Schisandra Cultivation, Detailed Explanation of Key Planting Techniques

To achieve high yield and high efficiency in cultivated Schisandra, three key steps must be taken first: first, variety selection, purification and improvement must be carried out; second, a period of domestication and adaptation is needed; third, pruning must be strengthened to regulate and control tree vigor. The three are mutually reinforcing and none can be omitted.

As early as more than 20 years ago, many farmers in our county tried cultivating Schisandra one after another, and all ultimately failed. The Kuandian County Schisandra Improved Variety Breeding Base also began trials in 1985, but the first two attempts also failed. In 1993 they summarized the reasons for the two failures and began tackling the problem anew. Based on the rule that crosses (inbreeding) between superior fruit tree varieties (lines) such as grapes and pears easily produce "transgressive segregation in progeny," they first carried out variety selection, purification, domestication and improvement of wild Schisandra. The main method was: select a patch of wild Schisandra on the mountain, and when the fruit ripens, choose plants with long, neat fruit clusters, large, compact and uniform berries, and excellent overall traits as breeding parents to retain, while completely removing all other inferior plants. In the following year's flowering period, measures such as cross-plant (flower) pollination and reciprocal repeated pollination were carried out on 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 plant them in flat ground and carry out open-field cultivation and domestication under full sunlight so that they gradually adapt to a high-temperature and drought environment. After these trees fruited, their seeds were harvested and used for seedling propagation for large-scale establishment of new commercial orchards. The superior varieties bred by this method had significantly enhanced stress resistance; they did not wilt even under high-temperature and drought weather, and grew normally even without rain for half a month. Third, attention was paid to pruning. At the same time as the young seedlings were planted, the main trunk was cut low 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 was kept as light as possible so that the branches and vines would 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 adopted supporting measures such as appropriate close planting, covering the tree disk 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 a 6-7-year-old orchard stabilized at 240 kg per mu, 3-4 times higher than wild varieties that had not undergone selection and improvement.