Plant Spacing and Cultivar Affects Yield Components, Qualitative Traits and Early Ripening of Tomato (Lycopersicon esculentum)

Abstract

Two-year field trial was set up on sandy clay soil in the Jiroft and Kahnouj Agricultural Research Center with the objective to determine the effect of plant spacing and different cultivars on the yield and qualitative characteristics of tomato (Lycopersicon esculentum). This experiment was performed as split plot based on complete randomized block design with 3 replications. The main plots were in – row spacing in 4 levels include 0.3, 0.4, 0.5 and 0.6 m and the subplots were cultivars naming ‘Shef ’, ‘Peto Early CH’ and ‘FDT 202’. The results showed that, fruit length to diameter ratio, total acidity, fruit number per plant, mean fruit weight, yield per plant, total yield and first harvest to total harvests ratio were significantly affected by plant spacing. In addition, cultivars showed significant effect on all traits evaluated (p<0.01). In this experiment, fruit length to diameter ratio and total acidity increased as plant spacing increased, however it had no effect on total soluble solids. In this study, total fruit yield is being increased while the yield per plant, number of fruit per plant and fruit weight is being reduced by increased number of plants per unit area. Although among tomato cultivar, ‘Peto Early CH’ had a higher yield over other cultivars, but cultivar ‘Shef ’ showed higher yield in the first harvest. Generally it seems according to the results collected that plant spacing 0.3 m and ‘Shef ’ cultivar owing to better adaptation and higher commercial yield for production in Jiroft city is suggested.