Effect of defoliation on growth and yield response in two tomato (Solanum lycopersicum Mill.) varieties

Abstract

An experiment was conducted at Plant Physiology laboratory of Bangladesh Institute of Nuclear Agriculture, Mymensingh, Bangladesh to investigate the effect of defoliations on crop characters, yield attributes and yield of two tomato varieties. The experiment comprised five levels of defoliation viz., 0 (control), 3, 6, 9 and 12 leaves defoliation out of 16 leaves and two varieties viz., Binatomato-4 and Binatomato-5. The experiment was laid out in two factors completely randomized design with four replications. Results revealed that defoliation and variety had significant effect on the studied crop characters and yield except the number of effective flower clusters per plant and fruit yield for variety. Most of the parameters like plant height, number of branches and leaves per plant, straw weight per plant, number of effective and non effective flower cluster per plant, number of flowers and fruits per plant, individual fruit weight and fruit yield per plant increased with defoliations over control up to 6 leaves and produced the highest in 3 leaves defoliated plant whereas the lowest was obtained in 12 leaves defoliated plants followed by 9 leaves defoliated plants. Therefore, due to the performance of morphological and yield attributing traits especially number of fruits per plant and number of fruits per cluster were superior in Binatomato-5 but fruit yield was inferior compared to Binatomato-4 in respect of smaller fruit size.