By Herbert Musoke
Denis Musiime, a research assistant at National Coffee Research Institute (NaCORI), says that because of the diseases affecting coffee that have caused many losses to farmers, the institute has started tissue culture in making clean coffee seeds.
“We now have a laboratory where we do tissue culture and then to the nursery bed. At the nursery bed, we use basins to grow the seedlings using coco peat or black soil from the forest, which is first treated as growing media,” he says.
Musiime says up to 300 seedlings can grow in a basin, and this can plant an acre.
This saves transport for the seedlings from the nursery to the main garden and eliminates transmission of diseases from one area to the other.
Also, they have come up with an innovation where nursery operators can have a mother garden within the house, which makes it easy for anyone to operate a nursery.
