Exploitation of heterosis in cucumber for earliness, yield and yield contributing traits under protected structure

Abstract

The research was conducted at Vegetable Research Centre, Gobind Ballav Pant University of Agriculture and Technology, Pantnagar, Uttarakhand during 2015-16. Fourteen parental lines including eight parthenocarpic lines, three gynoecious lines and three testers of monoecious lines were used to develop 33 F1 hybrids of cucumber by Line × Tester mating design to determine the magnitude of heterosis for earliness, yield and yield related traits during March-June and August –December in protected structures. The mean sum of squares were highly significant for all the characters indicated a wide genetic variation for the characters studied and the Parthenocarpic parental lines (PCUCP-2, PCUCP-3 and PCUCP-8) and monoecious parent (Pant Khira-1, PCUC-8, and PCUC-25) were observed to be the three top performing parents for yield per plant. Appreciable heterosis was observed over better parent and standard parent for most of the characters studied. The best F1 hybrid PCUCP-4 × PCUC-8, promising in both E1 and E2 showing 835% and 453% heterosis, respectively for yield per plant followed by PCUCP-3 x PCUC-8 (769%, 559%) for average fruit weight and PCUCP-1 × PCUC-8 (-98.77%, -95.53%) for node number to first female flower over standard check Pant Khira-1. So, PCUCP-4 × PCUC-8 can be tested as most stable genotype across the spring –summer and kharif-winter environments under polyhouse condition in northern plains and three hybrids viz., PCUCP-4 × PCUC-8, PCUCP-3 × PCUC-8 and PCUCP-1 × PCUC-8 may be exploited for commercial cultivation.