Cultivation
To yield sufficient fruit, 'Black Corinth' grapes need to be carefully managed. In ancient times, girdling was a standard practice to increase the set and size of seedless grapes, until the discovery of the plant hormone gibberellic acid, and its ability to do the same thing with less labor. Historically, 'Black Corinth' stock was probably kept for its pollen-producing abilities, so other female flowered varieties (with naturally higher yields) would set full crops.
The 'Black Corinth' cultivar is also reputed to be very prone to powdery mildew and susceptible to numerous other diseases, such as downy mildew and black rot.
Greece is still the primary producer of currants, amounting to about 80% of total world production, with California, South Africa and Australia sharing most of the remainder.
Read more about this topic: Zante Currant
Famous quotes containing the word cultivation:
“Let these memorials of built stone music’s
enduring instrument, of many centuries of
patient cultivation of the earth, of English
verse ...”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“Those who are esteemed umpires of taste, are often persons who have acquired some knowledge of admired pictures or sculptures, and have an inclination for whatever is elegant; but if you inquire whether they are beautiful souls, and whether their own acts are like fair pictures, you learn that they are selfish and sensual. Their cultivation is local, as if you should rub a log of dry wood in one spot to produce fire, all the rest remaining cold.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The cultivation of one set of faculties tends to the disuse of others. The loss of one faculty sharpens others; the blind are sensitive in touch. Has not the extreme cultivation of the commercial faculty permitted others as essential to national life, to be blighted by disease?”
—J. Ellen Foster (1840–1910)