Efforts to increase yield and quality of off-season crystal guava fruit through application of shoot dormancy breaking substances and shoot pruning

Research with the aim of analyzing the effect of bud dormancy breaker application and shoot pruning to increase yield and quality of crystal guava fruit outside the season was designed, using a factorial randomized group design with two factors. The first factor was potassium nitrate (K) application in four levels: K0 (0 g/tree), K1 (30 g/tree), K2 (60 g/tree), and K3 (90 g/tree). The second factor involves shoot pruning (P) with three levels: P0 (no pruning), P1 (pruning 2 internodes from the shoot tip), and P2 (pruning 3 internodes from the shoot tip). The combination of 12 treatments was repeated three times, using 36 crystal guava trees. Results showed that the interaction of pruning and potassium nitrate had no significant effect on most variables, except weight per fruit (very significant effect) and fruit diameter (significant effect). Individually, pruning had significant to very significant effects on all variables except KAR leaves, while potassium nitrate had significant to very significant effects on all parameters. The highest weight per fruit (240.33 g) and largest fruit diameter (8.05 cm) were achieved in the interaction P1K2 (pruning 2 internodes + potassium nitrate 60 g/tree), an increase of 22.48% and 16.50% over the untreated control (196.22 g; 6.91 cm). This finding proves that the combination of precision pruning and optimal doses of dormancy-breaking agents synergistically improve the quality attributes of off-season crystal guava fruits, especially in terms of fruit weight and size.