Chapter 60 Order 1,000 Fruit Seedlings

A guesthouse in Lingshan County.

After a full stomach, Deng Shirong said to the staff of the guesthouse: "Hello, I want to ask you something."

The staff member politely asked, "Comrade, is there anything I can help you with?"

Deng Shirong said, "I want to ask, is there a lychee farm nearby?"

It was only the 1980s, and there was basically no need to consider growing lychees on an individual basis. So before coming to Lingshan County, Deng Shirong's target was those state-owned farms.

The staff member smiled and said, "Of course there is. There is a large farm several dozen miles away from here called Xinguang Farm. As far as I know, this Xinguang Farm has planted at least several thousand acres of fruit, of which lychees account for more than 70%."

Deng Shirong's eyes lit up when he heard this, and he asked, "Excuse me, how do I get to Xinguang Farm? Is there a bus going there?"

The staff member said: "Xinguang Farm is in Luwu Commune. You can take a bus to Luwu Commune first, and then ask the locals for directions."

After being asked what he wanted, Deng Shirong thanked him and went back to his room to rest.

Compared with the hotels in later generations, the sanitary conditions of today's guesthouses are really hard to describe.

There were four beds in the room (in those days, if you were not a high-ranking official, even if you were rich, you would not be given a standard room). Maybe Deng Shirong came early, so he was the only one in the room for the time being. The quilts on the four beds all gave off a strange smell. Obviously, this smell was not the smell of one person, but a smell accumulated over the years. Smelling it once would make people remember it for a lifetime.

Nowadays hotels (guest houses) are basically like this, with quilts used by hundreds of thousands of people and mattresses spread out by hundreds of thousands of people. The hotel charges a few cents and is only responsible for ensuring that you do not sleep on the streets. As for changing quilts when guests check out like in later generations, that is simply impossible.

At this time, people staying in hotels pay attention to sleeping in the clothes on, half asleep and half asleep. This is mainly because there are other strangers in the room. No one dares to sleep too deeply unless they really can't bear it.

Deng Shirong kept all his money and belongings in the system space. He was not worried about losing his money and belongings due to sleeping too deeply. However, after living in those clean and hygienic hotels in later generations, it was impossible for him to sleep well in a guesthouse with such poor sanitary conditions.

Fortunately, there was no need to cover himself with a quilt in this kind of weather. Deng Shirong slept with his clothes on. He was basically in a half-asleep state in the first half of the night. He knew that there was another guest staying in the room, but he had no intention of getting up to say hello. Instead, he continued to sleep.

In the second half of the night, after getting used to the unpleasant smell in the room, Deng Shirong fell asleep.

In the morning, Deng Shirong woke up on time due to his biological clock.

I went out to wash my face, rinsed my mouth with water, checked out of the hotel, went out to have breakfast, and then went to the station to take a bus to Luwu Commune.

It was not until two o'clock in the afternoon that Deng Shirong finally arrived at Xinguang Farm.

The traffic in this era is really hard to complain about. After this experience, Deng Shirong secretly vowed that he really didn't want to go out and suffer this pain again unless it was necessary.

At the very least, we have to wait until transportation becomes more convenient and accommodation conditions improve before going out.

Fortunately, it was not difficult to contact leaders in that era, and Deng Shirong met the leaders of Xinguang Farm smoothly without much effort.

After greeting each other, Deng Shirong got straight to the point and said, "Leader, I am from Bangjie Brigade, Songshan Commune, Bobai County. I came here mainly to buy some fruit seedlings from your farm to plant back home. Is that possible?"

The farm leader smiled and said, "Of course you can. Comrade, what kind of fruit seedlings do you want to buy?"

Deng Shirong said, "I want to buy one thousand Guiwei lychee seedlings. Do you have any in your farm?"

The farm leader exclaimed: "Comrade, you have a good eye. The best fruit tree on our farm is the Guiwei lychee. We don't have the 1,000 seedlings you asked for now, but we can start circling branches and raising seedlings now, and we can plant them in early spring next year."

There are three ways to propagate litchi: sowing seeds, circling branches and grafting.

These three breeding techniques have been used from ancient times to the present, from China to the whole world.

The so-called seedling production means that after eating the lychee flesh, you can sow the lychee seeds in the ground. If they germinate and grow normally, they can grow into a lychee tree.

This method of propagation by sowing with litchi kernels is the most traditional and oldest method of propagation for litchi, and was most widely used in rural areas in ancient times.

The advantage of this method of propagating litchi is that it is convenient and easy, and can be planted at any time as long as there is soil. But the disadvantage is that the growth cycle is too long. It is impossible to grow a tree from sowing to its peak production period without more than ten years.

According to the Litchi Chronicle, the ancients defined this type of lychee as bearing fruit at the age of "one year", which is 12 years. Some varieties of lychee trees may take even longer.

Seed-propagated lychee trees can easily mutate and form new varieties depending on the different climatic environments and fertilizer and water conditions of the planting locations, and produce lychee fruits that are different from those of the mother tree.

For example, if you sow lychee kernels of the Guiwei or Feizishao varieties now, the fruit produced by the lychee trees ten years later may become a completely new variety of Guiwei or Feizishao, and the quality may become better or worse.

It is precisely this characteristic that has led to the emergence of such a rich variety of lychee varieties in China, with 208 lychee varieties in the country, including 83 in Guangdong, 50 in Guangxi, 58 in Fujian, and 17 in Sichuan, Hainan and Taiwan (according to the 1996 edition of the Lychee volume of the Chinese Fruit Tree Encyclopedia).

The ring branch propagation technology is to select strong branches from the lychee trees that have already produced fruit, peel off (cut) a circle of about 2 cm long bark on the branches, wrap them with nutritious mud, and then wrap the outside with straw or plastic film to keep it moist.

After 1-2 months, roots will gradually grow from the peeled branches. After the roots grow 2-3 times, they can be sawed off together with the soil and transplanted.

Experienced fruit farmers will also "temporarily plant" the sawed-off branches in a cool place first to allow the lychee seedlings to have more roots. After they have grown two more batches of leaves, they can be formally transplanted, which will result in a higher survival rate and faster growth in the later stages.

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There is still no accurate research on the time when the lychee ring propagation technique appeared. However, based on observations of old lychee trees in Lingshan County, Guangxi, China, and the roots that extend from the bottom of the lychee, it is speculated that the lychee ring propagation technique in Lingshan County has existed for at least 1,000 years.

This technique of looping branches is somewhat similar to the method of creating humans recorded in the Bible. Adam took a rib from his body to create the world's first woman, Eve; while looping branches is to select a branch from the mother tree to grow roots and sprout to become another new lychee seedling (tree).

There are two main advantages of ring branch propagation technology:

The first advantage is that if the selected branches are large and strong enough, the fruit seedlings can bloom and bear fruit in the second year after being planted.

The second advantage is that since the new lychee seedling is a branch of the original mother tree, it can maintain the pure characteristics of the original lychee variety to the greatest extent and will not change no matter where it is propagated and spread.

The only drawback is that you cannot circle too many branches on the same lychee tree, otherwise it will damage the tree and affect the flowering and fruiting of the mother tree.

As for the grafting propagation technology, it is to find lychee kernels that have strong adaptability to local planting, good drought, cold and disease resistance, and use the grown lychee seedlings as rootstocks to graft other high-quality lychee varieties. This is lychee grafting.

The grafting propagation technology not only adopts the sowing propagation technology, absorbing the survival advantages of litchi rootstock, but also gives full play to the advantages of high-quality litchi varieties through bud grafting, realizing upper and lower grafting and complementary advantages.

Combining the above three litchi propagation techniques: seed propagation, although convenient and easy, has the longest cycle and is prone to mutation.

The ring branch technology has the purest genetics of the variety and grows and bears fruit faster. It is an effective breeding method for protecting famous and high-quality varieties, but it does not have a taproot and has slightly lower resistance to adversities.

Grafting technology can mass-produce seedlings, which have both the survival advantages of rootstocks and the fruiting advantages of buds, but their purity is not as pure as that of circle branches.

Deng Shirong is familiar with the above three propagation techniques. His first choice this time was ring branch propagation, because ring branch propagation is the best way to maintain the purity of the variety.

In addition, the mountain at home had just been divided up and would take some time to cultivate, so what the farm leader said was exactly what he wanted.

So Deng Shirong nodded and agreed, then started to negotiate the price of the fruit seedlings with the farm leaders, signed a purchase contract, and paid a 30% deposit in advance.

(End of this chapter)