Two new fruits, coloured mango and the Falsa, got registration from the authorities of the National Seed Board enriching the existing list of the country’s fruits.
Rajshahi Fruit Research Centre of Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute (BARI) has developed new varieties of Bangladeshi fruits.
Dr Alim Uddin, the principal scientific officer of the centre, said that the coloured mango was carried from Saudi Arabia while the ‘Falsa’ is an indigenous fruit of Rajshahi.
With these two, the centre has added a total of nine varieties of fruits in the country, he said, the country now boasts of 92 varieties of 36 kinds of fruits.
“We are proud and delighted. We believe these fruits will be popular among farmers and people for their taste, nutrient values and commercial potential,” Dr Alim added.
Golam Mortuza, a BARI scientist, took a branch of a mango tree to the research centre in 2010. He collected the branch from Saudi Arabia while working on mangoes there.
Dr Alim described that scientists of the centre grew ten plants from the branch through grafting. Only one of those plants survived. It helped the researchers grow a total of five mother plants in ten years.
Giving a salient feature of the new mango variety he said the maroon-coloured mango is ripened at the end of the month of July.
This variety bears fruits at the end of July every year. Fruits become a vibrant maroon colour at its ripe stage.
The average weight of the mango is 550 grams with 75.35 per cent of consumable parts. The average sweetness of the mango is 22.83 per cent while the mango is 10.83 centimetre in length and 8.49 centimetre in breadth.
On the other hand, the fruit ‘Falsa’, an indigenous fruit of Rajshahi is, however, got registration for the first time in the country. The Falsa variety was selected from a 20-year-old tree of the centre. Falsa trees regularly bear fruits in May and June. These small round shaped fruits weigh around 0.66 grammes and become purple at the ripe stage.
This sweet and sour fruit has a 24 per cent sugar content and each of the trees bears 20kg of the fruit in a year. It has been renamed as ‘BARI Falsa-1’ while the coloured mango has been named ‘BARI Mango-14’. There are also some more registered coloured mangoes in the country.
The National Seed Board signed the certificates of the two fruit varieties. Rajshahi Fruit Research Centre scientists will furthermore expand the cultivation of Aam-14 and Falsa-1 in the years to come.