Effect of age of parent enset (ensete ventricosum) plants on production of suckers
2001
Mulugeta Diro(Areka Research Center, Areka (Ethiopia)) | Endale Tabogie(Areka Research Center, Areka (Ethiopia)) | Antanafua Bekele(Areka Research Center, Areka (Ethiopia))
Enset is traditionally propagated vegetatively whereby corms of old parent plants were used to produce suckers. Farmers in general prefer to produce larger number of vigorous suckers from a given corm. This experiment was executed with the objective of determining age of parent corm for better sucker production at Areka Research Center for two consecutive years (1994 and 1995). Five treatments consisting of 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 years old parent corms were compared for their differences in sucker production in RCBD with three replications. The overall number of sucker ranged between 30.5 and 63.7 per plant. One year old parent plants also produced considerable amount of suckers. Size of suckers (plant height, pseudoistem height and pseudoistem diameter) was not significantly influenced by age of parent plants. From these results it can be concluded that propagation cycle of enset can be shortened to two years without affecting amount and growth of the resulting suckers. It is also possible to use one year old transplants as parent plants to take advantage of early sucker production compared to the long cycle of farmers practices.
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