Fundamentals of Horticulture

Training

• Horticultural plants are grown for their produce like fruits, vegetable, flowers, medicinal components, spices (oleoresins), aromatic (essential oils) etc.
• Therefore, these plants should be managed in such a way that human desires for the purpose of growing them are fully satisfied in terms of quality and quantity of produce.
• This demands direct manipulation of plant growth itself or plant environment through various inputs.
• In manipulation of plant development, training and pruning are important for which our knowledge about plant development and its phenology has to be complete. These practices are important in fruit crops.

Training

Physical techniques that control the shape, size and direction of plant growth are known as training or in other words training in effect is orientation of plant in space through techniques like tying, fastening, staking, supporting over a trellis or pergola in a certain fashion or pruning of some parts.

Objectives

1. To improve appearance and usefulness of plant/tree through providing different shapes and securing balanced distribution.
2. To ease cultural practices including intercultivation, plant protection and harvesting.
3. To improve performance like planting at an angle of 45° and horizontal orientation of branches make them fruiting better.