Pg. 72-73 Litchi cultivar evaluation

A short harvesting period is one of the main constraints of the South African litchi industry. Litchi cultivation in South Africa dates back to 1876 when the first litchi tree was imported from the island of Mauritius. However, plants were noticed during 1875 in the Durban Botanical gardens – thus there is evidence that litchi came into the country earlier.
For more than a century only two cultivars have dominated plantings, with ‘Mauritius’ consisting of 75% of the litchi industry and ‘McLean’s Red’ 25% of the industry (Oosthuizen, 1993). Progress in litchi cultivar expansion and development has mostly been slow for a large part of this period. A demand arose in the early 1990s for high quality early and late cultivars in the wake of increasing competition from other Southern Hemisphere producing countries,
also producing the midseason ‘Mauritius’ cultivar. To address this situation, a project was initiated in 1992 where available cultivars, mainly limited to research orchards, were evaluated in a co-ordinated manner. In 1993, a breeding project was initiated to purposefully combine favourable traits of promising cultivars through hybridisation (Froneman et al., 2014). 

Litchis have a large genetic variation, which is a benefit for any breeding programme. It is therefore important to breed the crop for improved fruit and tree characteristics. The objective is to breed for large fruit with small seed, good taste and long shelf life and heavy yields. Furthermore, the shortcoming in terms of the relatively short harvesting period also
needs to be addressed (Froneman et al., 2014).