ISHS Acta Horticulturae 123: VI African Symposium on Horticultural Crops
FRUITS AND VEGETABLE PRODUCTION AND EXTENSION SERVICES IN AFRICA |
| Author: | Bede N. Okigbo |
| Abstract:
The nutritional well-being of peoples of all ages for which a balanced diet is necessary, variation in taste preferences among individuals and lack of monotony in our food cannot be easily and cheaply achieved without fruits and vegetables. The word fruit, horticulturally and botanically, is used to designate the soft often juicy seed bearing structure or ripe ovary of flowering plants that is usually eaten fresh as supplementary food or by itself. (Duckworth, 1966; Terra, 1966; Okigbo, 1975). Fruits may be sour, sweet, aromatic or with special taste and consumed in the mature state, sometimes with the addition of sugar as a dessert item (Terra, 1966). On the other hand, vegetables are the succullent plant parts that may be eaten as supplementary foods or side dishes in the raw state or in the cooked form, alone, with meat or fish, in stews, soups and various preparations (Thompson, 1949, Duckworth, 1966, Terra 1966; van Epenhuijsen 1974; Okigbo, 1975). They are similar to fruits in that they may be sweet, aromatic, bitter hot, tasteless and sometimes requiring salting and considerable seasoning to render them more tasty and acceptable. From the culinary point of view, soft edible structures developed from plant parts other than the seed are usually regarded as vegetables. Immature legume seeds and maize on the cob are also regarded as vegetables. Vegetables represent a wide range of plant parts including leaves, petioles, stems, roots, rhisomes, shoots, tubers, bulbs, inflorescences, seeds and fruits. Conventionally, plants may be designated as vegetable, fruit of arable crops depending on the intensity of production, techniques used, attention given to individual plants other gardening or horticultural production attributes and the way the products are utilized (Okigbo, 1975, 1978). Some usually staple arable food crops such as yams, cocoyams, sweet potatoes, Irish potatoes and cassava when grown in gardens in small plots under intensive care may be regarded as vegetables as compared to when they are grown under more extensive field production systems. With increased mechanization and commercialization in large scale production systems, these classifications are not always easily adhered to and certain root and tuber crops such as Irish potato and sweet potato are frequently classified as vegetable or horticultural crops. Sometimes also, certain varieties of a field crop, for example, vegetable cowpea (Vigna sesquepedalis) are regarded as vegetable while ordinary cowpea (Vigna unquiculata) is a field crop. Some crops grown mainly for one purpose may also be put to dual use. Thus cowpeas and cassava grown for their protein rich seeds and carbohydrate rich roots respectively, may also have their leaves harvested for vegetable. | |
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