PERFORMANCE OF TOMATO HYBRIDS UNDER HYDROPONIC CULTURE

An experiment was conducted for the hydroponic culturing of three tomato hybrid genotypes under the green house conditions at in vitro preservation laboratory of plant genetics resources institute (pgri), national agriculture research centre (narc), islamabad. the experiment was laid out in two factor randomized complete block design (rbcd). three tomato hybrids were assigned as factor a, whereas, two nutrient solutions were assigned as factor b. the differences between the nutrient solutions in channel-1 and channel-2 was the additional supplementation of mgso4.7h2o at the initial stage and k2hpo4 at the final phase in channel-2. parameters included in this study were: plant height (cm), number of nodes per plant, number of fruits per plant, fruit yield per plant (g), fresh and dried shoot weight (g) and fresh and dried root weight (g). amongst the hybrids, gala and roma produced statistically alike results for plant height (72.8 and 69.6 cm), number of nodes per plant (17.60 and 17.00), number of fruits per plant (28.8 and 34.4), fresh shoot weight (216.0 and 219.6 g) and dried shoot mass (61.52 and 63.13 g) respectively. however, hybrid roma excelled all the hybrid genotypes for fruit yield per plant (451.3 g), fresh root mass (142.7 g) and dried root mass (16.65 g). for the nutrient solutions, the result indicated that nutrient solution in channel-2 excelled the channel-1 in almost all the parameter studied.