Off-field sucker production of post-harvest banana corms under different hormonal and nutritional regime

Abstract

Banana is the most important fruit crop of the world. The production of banana propagules for different scales of its cultivation and for the farmers of different resource capacity is an important researchable issue. An improved macro-propagation technique for production of suckers from isolated corms under controlled laboratory condition may be a cheap and easy adoptable alternative to the micro-propagation of banana. An experiment on banana (Musa spp.) post-harvest corm was conducted at the Department of Plant Physiology, BCKV Mohanpur, to study the induction of sucker through different hormonal and nutritional intervention, which was laid out in Completely Randomized Design and replicated three times. Five treatments viz., T1 (Control treatment with water spray), T2 (Thio-urea 0.15%), T3 (nutrient mixture of urea @450 mg l-1 + Thio-urea @70 mg l-1 + CalciumNitrate @ 700 mg l-1+ Calcium monophosphate @150 mg l-1 + Magnesium chloride @80 mg l-1+ Boric acid @5 0mg l-1), T4 (Thiourea @0.15% + BAP@ 4ppm), T5 (nutrient mixture of T3 + BAP @4ppm). The substrate used for planting the corms were a mixture of sawdust + Trichoderma @ 15g kg-1 of sawdust + vermicompost @ 15g kg-1 of sawdust. Observations recorded were weight of the corm, days to appearance of the first primary suckers, number of primary suckers, number of secondary suckers, number of tertiary suckers and total number of suckers. T3 observed to be the best treatment in respect to all the