Assessing the impact of organic manure on the growth of five tomato cultivars
Abstract
Tomato (Lycopersicon esculentum) is an important vegetable crop grown throughout the world and considered as the main horticultural crop in Uganda. The yield per hectare is still very low due to poor soil fertility and inappropriate use of fertilizer. A field experiment was conducted to evaluate the effect of poultry manure and cow dung manure on five tomato cultivars. Growth performance and yield of tomato cultivars: Assila, Nuru F1, Rambo F1, Nouvella F1 and Fortune marker F1were evaluated in the poultry manure and cow dung manure on an experiment established using a randomized complete block design with three replica. The control experiment involved use of no organic manure. Data was collected on fruit number, fruit weight, cluster number, branch number, fruit set days, plant height and stem girth and then analyzed using Microsoft data analysis. The results showed that there was a significant interaction (p < 0.05) in fruit number, cluster number, fruit set days, branch number and plant height in the different treatments while stem girth and fruit weight didn’t differ significantly (p > 0.05) in all treatments. Poultry manure produced the highest growth performance and yield, with in the tomato cultivars, Rambo F1 and Nouvella F1 produced the highest yield in all treatments and need to be made available to local farmer since they were confirmed experimentally to produce better yield compared to Nuru F1 which had the lowest yield among the tomato cultivars in all the treatments.