RESPONSE OF TOMATO TO TRANSPLANTING DATE AND PLANT GROWTH REGULATORS

Abstract

The experiment was carried out in the Farm and Lab, of the Department of Agricultural Botany, Sher-e-Bangla Agricultural University, Dhaka, Bangladesh, during November 2014 to March 2015to investigate the response of tomato with plant growth regulators and transplanting date. In this study, variety BARI tomato 14varietywas used as a planting material and the treatments consisted of three different times of transplanting. T1=First transplanting date (10 December 2014), T2=Second transplanting (20 December 2014), T3= Third transplanting (30 December 2014), and four different combination of treatments viz Control= no plant growth regulators, Salicylic acid (SA)= o.3mM, Gibberellic acid (GA)= 20 ppm and the combination of (salicylic acid 0.3mM +gibberellic acid 20 ppm). There were 12 treatment combinations. The experiment was laid out in two factors Randomized Complete Block Design(RCBD) with four replication. In this study, 48 pots were used to conduct the experiment. Most of the results of this experiment showed significant difference to the treatments. SA and GA were applied exogenously. The First transplanting time significantly influence both on morphological and yield contributing characters and yield of tomato. The higher values of plant height, cluster plant-1, fruit length, fruit breadth, fruit number, individual fruit weight, yield plant-1 was found in first transplanting. The sole or together application of SA, GA and SA+GA showed significant effect on changes in fruit yield of tomato as compared to control. Thus combined effect of date of transplanting and plant growth regulators exhibit significant influence. The highest yield (494 gm/plant) was obtained from the first transplanting date along with salicylic acid and gibberellic acid and the lowest (196 gm/plant) was in third transplanting date along with control. Therefore, results combine application of SA+GA improves the fruit yield of tomato than sole application of SA and GA under SAU environmental condition.