Vol. 9, Issue 12 (2020)

Author(s):
Suchismita Jena, TR Ahlawat, AI Patel, BM Tandel, Abhilash Mishra and Lalitha KR

Abstract:
An experiment was conducted at College of Horticulture and Forestry, Navsari Agricultural University, Navsari, Gujarat during 2018-2020 with the aim to assess the per se performance of parents and hybrids for reproductive parameters in papaya. The experiment consisted of six morphologically diverse parents (PD, CO-2, CO-8, LL, GJP-1 and PS-1) and their resultant 30 F1 hybrids, obtained by crossing in full diallel fashion. All the parents and hybrids were evaluated in randomized block design with three replications. Based on per se performance, amongst all the parents, parents PD, GJP-1 and LL hold enormous potentiality as they offer good yield, precocious flowering, fruiting and fruit set at lower plant height for easy harvesting of papaya, respectively. However, out of all the hybrids; maximum yield, fruit girth and volume was found in hybrid PD x LL; maximum fruit length in cross CO-8 x CO-2; early flowering and harvesting in cross CO-2 x PS-1; minimum inception height of first fruit set in cross LL x PD and maximum number of fruits per plant in cross CO-8 x PD with lowest cavity volume of fruits in cross PS-1 x PD. Based on their mean performance, parents can be used in papaya improvement programmes and hybrids could be exploited for commercial cultivation.