Abstract:
Tomato (
Lycopersicon esculentum
Mill
.) belongs to the
Solanaceae
family.
It is
a
perennial but
is grown as an annual plant.
The use of improper plant
spacing is among the reasons of low
productivity of tomato, and it greatly influences the growth and yield of tomato
.
Hence,
maintenance of proper plant population is very important to obtain the desired yield. Therefore,
this research was initiated to
determine the optimum inter
-
and intra
-
row spacing for the better
tomato productivity. In order to achieve the above objectives, field experiment was conducted on
Roma
-
VF tomato variety
in Bilajig kebele under the
Gondar T
own Administration
District
from
D
ecember 2017 to April 2018 by irrigation.
The treatment
s
consisted of factorial combination of
four levels of inter
-
row spacing (60, 80, 100 and 120 cm) and three levels of intra
-
r
ow
spacing
(20, 30 and 40 cm)
laid out in the randomized complete block des
ign with three replications
.
All
data were analyzed by using SAS
statistical
software
.
The result
s
revealed that tomato plants
planted at 20 cm intra
-
row spacing had earliest day
s
to 50% flowering and days to
maturity
but
all parameters had no interaction effect.
The highest plant
height
was recorded at the
spacing of
60 cm (54.02 cm)
inter
-
row
with 20 cm (52.80 cm
intr
a
-
row
)
.
T
he lowest plant height was
obtained
at
120 cm (49.04 cm) with 40 cm (49.39 cm)
spacing
.
Highly
s
ignificant effect (p<0.01)
of inter
-
row spacing and significant effect (p<0.05) of intr
a
-
row spacing
were
observed for
marketable and total fruit yield
.
The highest marketable fruit yield was obtained at 60 cm (
22.60
t ha
-
1
)
inter
-
row
with 20 cm (
21.02
t ha
-
1
)
intr
a
-
row
s
pacing but stati
sti
cally similar to 30 cm
(
20.40
t ha
-
1
)
. On the other hand, the lowest total and marketable fruit yield was obtained
at
the
wider spacing of 40 cm intra
-
row with 120 cm inter
-
row spacing but, the highest fruit weight
was recorded
at 40 cm (70.63 g) intra
-
row spacing and the lowest fruit weight was recorded
at
20 cm (62.03 g) intra
-
row spacing.
From this study it could be c
oncluded that
if farmers use
60
cm inter
-
row
and 20
cm intra
-
row
spacing
they can get higher yield
