Performance of Modified Chitosan Treated Tomato (Lycopersicon esculentum) Seedlings on the Growth and Yield of Tomato

Abstract

A pot experiment was conducted at the net-house of Sher-e-Bangla Agricultural University, Dhaka, during the period from October 2015 to March 2016 to investigate the effect of modified chitosan on seedling morphological characters, growth and reproductive characters and yield performance of tomato cv. BARI tomato-15. The experiment was designed with five treatments using four level of modified chitosan in the seedbed soil (10 kg of soils per pot). The used treatments were T 1 modified chitosan/pot), T 4 (control), T 2

(50 g modified chitosan/pot), T 3 (150 g modified chitosan/pot) and T 5 (100 g (200 g modified chitosan/pot). The experiment was laid out in earthen pots arranged in a randomized complete block design (RCBD) with three replications. Application of modified chitosan increased seedling height, fresh and dry weight of seedlings, soil pH, organic carbon (%), organic matter (%), number of flowers/ plant, fruits/plant, fruit size and fruit yield over control. Most of the morpho-physiological, reproductive and yield attributes were increased with increasing doses of modified chitosan, whereas control plants showed the lowest value of the above parameters. Most of the morphological, growth and reproductive attributes were recorded maximum in the T 4 and the highest fruit yield was recorded in the T 5 might be due to the morpho-physiological changes and increased number of fruits/plant. Therefore, application of modified chitosan at 150g or 200g/pot (10 kg soils) could be used for getting quality seedling, leading to maximizing the tomato fruit yield. treatments. It