ISHS Acta Horticulturae 807: International Symposium on Strategies Towards Sustainability of Protected Cultivation in Mild Winter Climate
IS THE AGRONOMIC QUALITY OF TOMATO SEEDLINGS RELATED TO THEIR CHARACTERISTICS AT TRANSPLANTING? |
| Authors: | C. Leonardi, F. Giuffrida |
| Keywords: | earliness, yield, plantlets, nursery, tomato |
| Abstract:
There are many papers analyzing the effects of growing techniques in the nursery on seedling characteristics and/or crop performance; on the contrary the knowledge concerning the cause/effect relationship between the seedling characteristics and the crop response is very narrow. This knowledge could have a more direct application in view of the fact that the farmer purchasing seedling tends to express a judgment on the basis of the exterior seedling characteristics. In relation to the above, a research that had the aim of studying the relationship between seedling biometric characteristics in correspondence of the transplanting and the response in terms of crop yield and earliness was conducted. The experimental activities have been carried out adopting the tomato cv. Panarea F1. In order to have plants with different characteristics at the time of transplanting, which was carried out simultaneously for all the thesis, seedlings were grown in nursery adopting different hole dimension and shape, plant density, seedling ageing, degree of hardening, nutritional status. The correlation matrix between seedling biometric parameters at transplanting and those related to crop response has shown values of the coefficient very different depending on the parameter considered. It is also evident that certain seedling parameters traditionally considered by farmers in the selection of seedling do not seem to assume a clear import (e.g.: leaf greenness, presence of root hairspring). Among the crop agronomic parameters assuming greater significance, only those related to earliness are correlated to some of the considered seedling characteristics, whereas there is no clear effect on the level of yields. | |
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