Treatments of chemical and plant growth regulators on sapota fruit

Freshly harvested uniform sized sapota fruits were washed, cleaned and treated with CaCl2 10,000 and 5,000 mg/l for 5 minutes, GA3 150 and 300 mg/l for 10 minutes, kinetin 100 and 200 mg/l for 20 minutes and ethrel 1,000 and 2,000 mg/l for 5 minutes. Treated and untreated fruits were packed in card board cartons of 30 x 30 x 30 cm size with 6 vents each of 3 cm diameter equally on opposite sides and stored in the PG laboratory. The experiment was framed in Completely Randomized Design and repeated four times with eight treatments and a control. The fruits were subjected to various quantitative and qualitative analysis on 4th, 6th, 8th, 10th and 12th days of storage period. CaCl2 5000 mg/l was found best treatments which not only extended the shelf-life of sapota fruits but also reduced the post-harvest losses and increased fruit firmness, days taken to ripening, TSS, reducing, non reducing and total sugars and decreasing trend with respect to acidity.