Studies On Dwarf Coconut To Resist Cold By Covering Bags

Due to the improvement of tourism and living in our country, there are great needs of coconut for fruit drinks purpose. It is needed to modify the planting of the current coconut. There is good market to develop planting dwarf coconut in Hainan. The red dwarf coconut, yellow dwarf coconut and green dwarf coconut introduce from Malaysia are popular due to their colourful appearance and delicious taste. However, the cold weather influence economic benefit of the plantation of these dwarf coconut in Hainan. Many dwarf coconut fruits found to be cracked and flecked. To solve these problem, we make a research of covering coconut fruit with bags just like the planting of banana and guava by covering ruit with bags. Covering fruit with bags is a new research in coconut research.We investigate the crack problem of the above mentioned three dwarf coconut, and we sort the dwarf coconut into six grade according to the size of perimeter: below 20cm, 20～25cm, 25～30cm, 30～35cm, 35～40cm, above 40cm. The green dwarf coconut start to be cracked when the perimeter size above 25cm. Around 56% dwarf coconut fruits had cracked problem when the perimeter size to be 35cm, and the size of dwarf coconut were found to be most seriously of crack problem. The problem will reduce to be around 30% when the perimeter size above 40cm. The red dwarf coconut and yellow'dwarf coconut start cracked when the perimeter size to be above 35cm. When the perimeter size to be above 40cm, most serious problem of crack founded, at least 15% coconut had these problem.For green dwarf coconut, we used three packing materials of double layer of kraft paper, pearl -sponge bags plus polybag and knitting bags. For red and yellow dwarf coconut, we used double layer of kraft paper, and knitting bags. From Dec.2006 to Mar.2007, we noticed that the above packing materials had not good result in the red dwarf coconut and yellow dwarf coconut for reducing fruit dropping and cracking, but had obvious good result to green dwarf coconut. The double layer kraft and knitting bags can reduce 30-40% fruit dropping, however not good result was founded by the pearl -sponge bags plus polybag. The above three packing materials all can obviously improve the appearance of dwarf coconut. The first grade green dwarf coconut can increase to be 50%, and 40% for red and yellow dwarf coconut. From our test, the double layer of kraft paper and knitting bags were good packing material to reduce crack and fleck problem of dwarf coconut, however the pearl -sponge bags plus polybag was. worse for packing due to the high moisture inside the bags, which can not reduce the rate of fruit dropping.