Abstract

A study on the prevalence of sexes and yield characteristics of hormone induced Fluted pumpkin (Telfairia occidentalis) was carried out at the Teaching and Research Farm of the Rivers State University of Science and Technology, Port Harcourt. Induction of fluted pumpkin seeds with 0, 100, 200 and 300 parts/million (ppm) each of Gibberellic Acid (GA₃), Indole-3-Acetic Acid (IAA), Naphthalene Acetic Acids (NAA) and Ethrel (ET) was done before planting. The treatment with GA₃ 300 ppm significantly reduced number of days before first male flower initiation to 94 Days After Planting (DAP) while increase in the number of days before first female flower initiation was 155 DAP with IAA300 ppm. Similarly, number of female and male flowers/vine were reduced but GA3 200 gave the highest number of 57 male flowers/vine. Marketable vegetable yield decreased with higher levels of hormones at twelve weeks after planting. Consequently, low level of treatment at 100 ppm gave higher vegetable yields comparable to that of control. The highest yield of 2.2 kg/vine was obtained with Ethrel 100 ppm. Pod yield/vine significantly increased at above 100 ppm for all the treatments. The highest seed yield of 90 seeds/pod was obtained with IAA 300 ppm. Seed weight (kg/pod) generally decreased at 300 ppm but IAA 300 ppm had the highest seed yield of 1.13 kg/pod. The lowest but the best sex ratio (M/F) of 0.30:1 was obtained with IAA3 300 ppm. Reduction in sex ratio resulted in favorable increase in the number female plants/plot of fluted pumpkin.

Keywords:

Fluted pumpkin, hormone induced, pod yield characteristics, prevalence of sexes,

References

Competing interests

The authors have no competing interests.

Open Access Policy

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

Copyright

The authors have no competing interests.