Lack of high-yielding climate-resilient varieties and, frequent pest and disease incidences are the major issues in tomato production in Bhutan. The National Centre of Organic Agriculture, Yusipang, introduced 40 open-pollinated entries between 2020 and 2021. With an objective to evaluate and select the most desired tomato varieties for commercial cultivation in Bhutan, seven tomato entries were prescreened and selected using combined scoring of the total votes from the Participatory Varietal Selection and yield of entries in 2021. The Randomized Block Design with eight entry treatments and three replications with Ratan as standard check was employed to evaluate their yield and yield parameters; fruit quality; and tolerance to pests and diseases in 2022. ANOVA followed by Tukey HSD test for mean separation was employed at p-value at P<0.05. The result showed that AVTO1954 produced a significantly higher yield (29.8 tons/acre) compared to AVTO1910 but not significantly different from AVTO1702 (28.5 tons/acre) and AVTO1907 (28.4tons /acre). Although Roma (check) produced the highest total number of fruits per plant (110), it produced the lowest number of marketable fruits per plant (7) compared to all other entries, while the plant height did not show any statistically significant differences between different treatment entries. Two entries with the lowest disease incidence were AVTO1702 and AVTO1954, while Roma was infested with blight and powdery mildew at 27% and 45% respectively. The study recommends the release of three entries viz-a-viz AVTO1954, AVTO1907 and AVTO1702 and similar research in other agroecological zones of Bhutan to identify appropriate varieties in their zones.
An experiment was conducted to assess the effect of different pruning systems on the yield and quality of tomatoes grown under greenhouse at the National Centre for Organic Agriculture, Yusipang for the growing period of March to November 2019. The experiment was conducted with a randomized complete block design with a single factor at three different levels viz. single leader system (T1), double leader system (T2), and unpruned plants (T3) which were treated as the control for the experiment. All the leaves and axillary shoots below the first flower cluster were pruned off. For treatment T1, only the main stem was encouraged to grow. As for the treatment T2, the sucker growing just below the cluster was also encouraged to grow along with the main stem. This sucker served as the second leader. No pruning of leaves or axillary shoots was carried out in the control plot (T3) at all times. The plants that were pruned started fruiting and maturing earlier than that of unpruned plants. It was also observed that the vegetative and reproductive growth of plants was lengthened by pruning. Although the plants pruned into a single leader system yielded higher than the double leader and the unpruned plants, no statistically significant differences were observed amongst the means of the total yield. The difference in the individual fruit weight, length and diameter amongst the treatments were also found to be statistically not significant. The findings from this research suggest that although pruning gives a higher yield than control there is no significant difference in the yield of tomatoes grown in greenhouse till the 6th harvest. Pruning the plants to a single leader system proved to improve the fruit quality substantially for tomatoes grown in the greenhouse.
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