comparison of the growth, fruit quality, and physiological characteristics of tomato nourished by three different nutrient solutions in soil and soilless culture systems

To evaluate the effect of different nutrient solutions on growth and yield characteristics of tomato plants, as well as to evaluate the quantitative and qualitative characteristics of fruit in soil- and soilless-cultivation, factorial experiment was carried out with two factors of cultivation system at two levels (soil cultivation and soilless cultivation) and three levels of nutrient solution (hoagland, hochmat and shan) in a completely randomized design with three replications in greenhouse conditions. the results showed that soilless culture medium (cocopeat-perlite) increased vegetative and reproductive characteristics, such as plant height, number of nodes, flowers and fruits, internode distance, number of leaves, leaf area, fresh and dry weight of shoots, fresh and dry weight of roots, stem diameter, and fruit diameter in tomato plants. many growth and morphological traits, such as leaf area, stem length, stem fresh weight, root dry weight, fruit diameter, leaf number, fruit number and yield were influenced by the interaction effect of nutrient solution and cultivation system. the photosynthetic pigments, and fruit quality traits including fruit appearance color (three components a*, b* and l*), hue angle, chroma, total soluble solids (tss), and vitamin c increased in soilless system compared with soil-based system. hoagland nutrient solution had higher significant effect on increasing quantitative and qualitative traits than other nutrient solutions. in general, soilless cultivation with hoagland nutrient solution had a significant positive effect on growth and yield characteristics, as well as the quantitative and qualitative characteristics of fruit compared with the other treatments.