Changes of Growth and Yield by using Rootstocks in Tomato

Abstract

This research was conducted to examine the changes in yield and difference in growth, using rootstocks in tomatoes as the growth indicators. Seedlings of tomato 'Gama', were used as scion and non-grafted control, while 4 different grafted tomatoes 'Powerguard', 'T1', 'L1', and 'B.blocking' were used as rootstocks. The non-grafted and grafted plants were grown in hydroponics for long-duration cultivation under plastic greenhouse conditions. The total yield of grafted tomato 'Powerguard' and non-grafted tomato 'Gama' were 8,428 g and 7,645 g, respectively. The flowering position of grafted plants 'B.blocking' and non-grafted plants at the latter period were 17.58 cm and 14.92 cm, respectively. The results showed that the yield and the balance of the plant were improved until the end of the harvest by grafting. The difference in yield between non-grafted and grafted tomatoes was evident in the 19th cluster, 236 days after planting. Therefore using rootstocks could be advantageous for long-duration cultivation in tomatoes.

The effect of grafting on vegetative and reproductive traits of tomato

“…3A and C). Similar different results in tomatoes were obtained in reports [2,14,18,21,28]. Moreover, almost the same differences in measurement of the fruit quality were observed in FL and FD, where depends on the scion and rootstock it was varied during growth period.…”

“…Presumablythis might be due to mainly from the misbalance in metabolites and osmotic balance [13][14][15][16]19]. Additionally, our results demonstrate that the leaf parameters for the scion practically was not significantly affected by rootstock [18,21],whereas this contrarywith a other reports where the rootstock increased the leaf area [19,22].…”

“…2A and B). The differences observed in evaluation of the productivity probably reported recently, where grafting may increase [1,8,21,27,28], decrease [2,27,29] or either did not affect [30,31]of the yield in tomatoes and associated with physiological compatibility between scion and rootstock with response to the cultivation conditions [4,18,32,33].…”

“…Investigation of the effect rootstock on the beginningflowering time among tomatoes showed different response of the cultivars in combination with grafting and nongrafting, where the significant reduction in the days to flowering were identified in plants grafted onto rootstock 'Spider' in all studied tomatoes (Table 1). However, in the next growth period the differences between CT and GR plants were reduced, and in the end of experiment there no significant differences in the days to flowering among all cultivars and treatmentswere observed [21].…”

“…It should be noted, with aging of the tomato plants and ambient temperature the fruit quality parameters such as FFW, FL, FD, FPTand FHwere slightly decreased, except the index of FSS. Additionally, previous results show that the fruit size of vegetable crops are often influenced [3,18,21,34] or unaffected [35][36][37] by grafting combination.…”