Economical effectiveness of vegetative pear nurseries in Albania

Sapling production on vegetative rootsctock is considered as an important agronomic activity while Albanian arboriculture is being oriented towards the world contemporary development. The paper presents the evaluation of economical effectiveness of the vegetative pear nurseries, since the evaluation of the increase of economical effectiveness and farm productivity as a real potential of Albanian farmers. The experiment was carried out during two consecutive years, 2009-2010, by the Department of Horticulture at Agricultural University of Tirana in collaboration with a certified national nursery. A randomized complete block design (RCBD) with 4 replications and 6 variants with a plot size of 50 saplings for variant in each replication was used. Pear cultivars Abate Fetel, Williams and Koshia used as scions grafted over seedy rootsctock of wild pear and vegetative rootsctock of quince clone Anger, (EM – A), were compared. The data showed that different rootstocks affected sapling features and quality. The use of quince vegetative rootstock EM-A provided the highest values of grafting catching rate of 93.7% (V2,V4,V6) and 95.3% standard saplings of both scions (V2,V4,V6). According to the official standards of the Albanian government, considering the qualitative aspect, both pear cultivars grafted over EM-A rootstocks provided higher qualitative saplings. So, for variants V2 and V4, saplings with 2-3 sceletal branches represented 88.6% and 84.7%, respectively; while saplings with main shoot length of 31-40 cm for variants V2, V4, V6 represented 18.1%, 23.5% and 24.3%. The achieved results confirms the need of spreading and widely use of “mother“ plots for vegetative rootstock production, beside the fact that this sapling category is ready to be planted in open fields one year earlier than saplings with seedy rootstock. The two years data were confirmed statistically by LSD and ANOVA tests.