Morphological evaluation of sex ratio and vegetative yield comparison of female and male plants of two fluted pumpkin (Telfairia occidentalis Hook F) varieties

Abstract

Experiments which aimed at evaluating the differences in sex ratio and the vegetative yield performance of male and female plants of two Telfairia occidentalis varieties were carried out during early cropping seasons of 2016 and 2017 at two different sites of Federal College of Agriculture, Institute of Agricultural Research and Training, Moor Plantation Ibadan. Two varieties (ENO2-5 and ENO2-3) were used as test crop using nine populations comprising 472 and 576 plants as the treatments. The experiment was laid in Randomized Complete Block Design with four replications. Morphological data such as number of vines, average vine length, number of leaves, leaf area were collected. Also recorded were number of days to flowering, number of flowers per plant, total vegetative yield. The vine length (130.19 cm/plant) at four weeks after planting (WAP) of female plants and the number of leaves and vines at 4 and 8 WAP were significantly higher also. The cumulative vegetative yield of female plants were 7.03 t ha^-1 and 6.27 t ha^-1 at the two planting sites and these were significantly (p<0.05) different from those of male (4.82 t ha-1 and 5.46 t ha-1) in both years and locations. The sex ratios of female plants to male plants were 1: 1.56 and 1: 1.56 which indicated more males than the female while the female plants also gave higher vegetative yield than males respectively.