Growth and Yield of Taro (Colocasia esculenta (L) Schott.) as Affected by Planting Distance

Abstract

Taro, Colocasia esculenta (L) Schott., is a staple food for many people in Africa. Despite the numerous importance of the crop, it still remains an underutilized crop in Ghana with little information on many aspects of the crop, especially agronomic practices. This experiment was conducted to identify the effect of planting distance on growth and yield of two promising taro accessions. The experiment was laid out using the split-plot design arranged in Randomized Complete Block Design (RCBD) with three replications in which accessions (BL/SM/80 and BL/SM/16) were used as main plots and three planting distances (1 m × 1 m, 1 m × 0.75 m, and 1 m × 0.5 m) as subplots. Data were recorded on the 4th, 8th, 12th, 16th, 20th, 24th, and 28th week after planting (WAP) for growth parameters while yield data were taken at harvest. The results indicated that plant height (63.4 cm), petiole length (44.0 cm), number of leaves (4.7), leaf length (31.7 cm), and width (20.5 cm) were significantly ( P ≤ 0.05 ) higher in closely spaced plants than widely spaced plants at 4 WAP and 8 WAP for petiole length (70.3 cm) and in the 28th WAP where there was an accession effect on leaf length and number of suckers/plant. The highest corm yield/plant (0.63 kg) and total corm yield/ha (11.7 t/ha) in both accessions were achieved by the medium plant spacing (1 m × 0.75 m) and lower plant spacing (1 m × 0.5 m), respectively. Accession BS/SM/80 recorded the highest total yield/ha of 13.0 t/ha for 1 m × 0.5 m plant spacing. The higher number of suckers (8.1) was recorded by higher spaced plants. From the study, it was seen that growth parameters correlated significantly and positively with yield. It is therefore recommended that farmers in the area and those in similar production areas use a spacing of 1 m × 0.5 m for optimum growth and yield.

Placement Precision of Organic Fertilizer Based on Soil Conservation in Taro Cultivation

“…Plant height increases until the age of 24 AWP. This result is in accordance with the research stated by (Boampong et al, 2020), which also shows that plant height increases until the age of 24 AWP. The MB treatment showed plant height 118.33 cm, highest leaf length 70.67 cm, and leaf width 51.67 cm significantly different from the MN and MH treatments.…”

Comparative Transcriptome Sequencing of Taro Corm Development With a Focus on the Starch and Sucrose Metabolism Pathway

“…Since the edible part of Taro is the corm, therefore, understanding the multitude of changes, especially during development is an important task of taro breeders ( Boampong et al, 2020 ). The corm development starts as early as 2 weeks after planting followed by a rapid growth in the first 2 months in the rainfed areas whereas this growth is slightly delayed in irrigated conditions (up to 3–5 months).…”

“…The maximum corm weight is reached in 10–11.5 months. However, farmers start harvesting the corms as early as 8 months after planting ( Ahmadizadeh et al, 2011 ; Boampong et al, 2020 ). Therefore, we opted to study the transcriptome of taro corms of ages 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 8 months.…”

Taro in West Africa: Status, Challenges, and Opportunities

“…In recent years, scientists in WA and beyond have been gathering information, developing strategies, and evaluating stress factors to help to improve the taro crop [8,18,19,58,64,[94][95][96][97][98]. Two of the improvements achieved to date are outlined as follows: i.…”