Experience of an amateur Litchi grower in Western India

Traditionally, litchi in India is primarily grown in the north, specifically in Northern Bihar in the area around Ranchi town and also around the Dehra Dun area in Uttar Pradesh. I have also heard that some is planted in Punjab in the north on a smaller scale but have never got to taste it. In Western India, there is a town called Golvad near the border of the states of Gujarat and Maharashtra where litchis have also been grown along the coast with mixed results. 

My father began by planting over 150 litchi trees at our first farm in Lonavala in 1989. He was discouraged from planting litchi because it went against the received wisdom. First he was told that the young plant would not survive even a year after planting. When it did, he was told that it would never flower due to Lonavala having an indistinct winter. When it did flower he was told it would abort and never set fruit. When fruit set was good, he was told that was all very well, but the fruits were bound to be sour and anyway mature when the market was flooded with better produce from Bihar. Well, the fruits turned out sweet and was ready to eat two weeks before any other litchi was available.

Since, I have had a special fondness for litchi I have been growing as many cultivars that I can locate. I discovered longan and rambutans only on my first trip to Thailand in 1998 and since think that longans may eventually take over as my favourite fruit. In my opinion, it has a more complex and musky flavour and many more notes in taste than the litchi. The litchi has more flesh and is easier to eat but the sugar acid ratio which makes it a great fruit to eat still leaves it a little flat compared to an exceptional longan like the Thai 'See Chomphoo' or 'Edo'. 

In my short experience of four years of growing litchi I have learnt that litchi roots are extremely brittle and it is important not to press the mud around the sapling too hard when transplanting the air layer into the ground. I have killed many a litchi sapling in my early years treating a litchi transplant as one would treat, say a relatively hardier tree like the mango. After transplanting, the litchi sapling is more often than not liable to sit there sulking for a year or maybe two, neither growing nor dying. Very frustrating as any amateur litchi grower will testify. Somewhere it decides that the sulk has been long enough and then will grow regularly, so one has to learn to be patient through this seemingly interminable limbo stage. 

Litchi, unlike temperate fruits does not require chilling hours (simplistically put, number of hours below 10C) but it does require some seasonal change so that it gets cooler temperatures in winter. There have been some selections for warm winter areas like Khom from Thailand (which does not taste great but is used for canned litchis with sugar syrup), Madrasi in India and Kaimana of Hawaii. 

It is very important to discontinue watering the litchi during the cooler winter months and ensure that there is no vegetative growth. The stress of no moisture and cool weather is the trigger that the tree needs to flower and fruit. India due to its monsoons and the relatively dry 7-8 following months, it is easy to monitor the amount of water that the tree receives. Equatorial climates with their rain spread out through the year would find this a problem, besides not having the cooling or seasonal changes that litchis require. Mediterranean climates, while subtropical, may not be suitable because of winter rains. 

One of my concerns, first pointed out by my friend Ashish Hansoti, about sourcing high quality planting material was that there would be a tendency of litchi plantation owners to not air layer those trees that give them the biggest and most regular crops. Commercially it would make sense to in fact air layer trees that do not yield and therefore there could be a tendency for mediocre quality plants to spread. How accurate this is, is anyone's guess. All one can bank on is that anyone who loves growing fruit trees would not knowingly distribute bad wood.