YOUR INDUSTRY
Nigel has been growing and breeding feijoas for nearly three decades
Breeding a better feijoa Nigel Ritson is working with feijoas that can be stored in the chiller for 100 days and still taste good seven days after they have been taken out. By Anne Hardie The implications of growing feijoas that can be successfully stored for that length of time and still taste good are huge for growers. But though Nigel has bred fruit that can achieve that success, he says there’s still a long way to go before he has a cultivar ready for the market. Nigel isn’t your average plant breeder. For starters he isn’t a research scientist and there’s no funding for his plant breeding which leans towards fanatical. Hundreds of pages of spreadsheets record every detail about the trees and fruit on his lifestyle property near Takaka in Golden Bay. He happened into feijoa plant breeding after his life fell apart and he moved to a cheap block of land three decades ago with two young boys who happened to like feijoas. Which was fortunate because the pakihi soils are pretty tough to grow anything. Infertile and impervious, even feijoas struggled, with those at the bottom of the sloped land succumbing to the waterlogged soil. A digger created
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The ORCHARDIST : JULY 2021
a humped and hollowed landscape on the block to drain the soil and create mounds for the plants to grow. Since then he has grown up to 3,000 feijoa trees, until his obsession with finding the ultimate fruit saw him cull all bar 50-or-so trees. He’s now in the throes of replanting from those remaining top trees to get a fruit that combines incredible taste, good handling, disease resistance and the ability to store well so it can be shipped around the world. He hasn’t fertilised the older trees for 10 years and new plantings just get enough fertiliser to get going. It’s all part of his goal of producing varieties that not only taste good and have all the other important attributes for fruit, but also grow on tough trees. His first 600 feijoa trees came from the then Riwaka Research Centre more than 20 years ago when its feijoa funding ended and he teamed up with experienced
