Characterization of Cactus Pear from Tigray, Northern Ethiopia

  Shushay Welderufael

Cactus pear is a fruit crop which can grow in water-limited conditions, high temperatures and poor soils wherein cereals and pulses cannot survive. It is used as a source of food, forage, fuel wood, cash income, raw material for various industrial products, as live fences and soil conservation purposes. This multi-functionality of the crop identifies it as a plant that imperative to areas in arid and semi-arid regions. However, this fruit crop is not developed as in case of other agricultural crops as fruit and forage varieties due to difficulties such as lack of adequate characterization and evaluation, a few collections maintained worldwide and difficulties and costly of preservation resulted from its perennial habit and large plant size. In Ethiopia particularly in Tigray Regional State where cactus pear is dominantly growing, this fruit crop has kept ignored and not yet researched. Further, little work has done on systematic characterization and evaluation of cactus pear in the region and their germplasm is not collected and maintained. Thus, this study was conducted to describe commonly growing cactus pear varieties at south Tigray to contribute for its improvement and conservation. Accordingly, six commonly growing farmers’ cactus varieties (Enfirir, Maymayo, Wedwado, Lamtsa, Harfaf and Michla) were described based on the internationally accepted and standardized descriptor methods. Characters like plant descriptor, cladode descriptor and fruit descriptors and other observation were described.

Keywords- cactus pear, characterization, varieties

Unique Identification Number - IJEDR1602053
Page Number(s) - 304-308
Pubished in - Volume 4 | Issue 2 | April 2016
DOI (Digital Object Identifier) -   
Publisher - IJEDR (ISSN - 2321-9939)

  Shushay Welderufael,   "Characterization of Cactus Pear from Tigray, Northern Ethiopia", International Journal of Engineering Development and Research (IJEDR), ISSN:2321-9939, Volume.4, Issue 2, pp.304-308, April 2016, Available at :http://www.ijedr.org/papers/IJEDR1602053.pdf