Incidence of blind transplants of processing tomato from primed seeds

In recent years, processing tomato growers have been faced with a new problem: an increased number of blind transplants.
Usually, the ‘blind’ symptoms of plants lacking a normally developed growing point are not easy to detect until a later seedling growth stage.
Preliminary studies suggest that the use of priming (pre-germination treatment, based on seed water imbibition) may contribute to the appearance of blind transplants.
Thus, this study aimed to evaluate abnormal growth changes in tomato seedlings from primed seed treatment.
Seeds from two parental lines and the F₁ hybrid were submitted to priming in aerated solution of KNO₃ (3%), under light, at 20°C for 9 days and subsequent germination and seedling emergence under greenhouse conditions.
There was a higher incidence of blind transplants in primed seeds compared with non-primed seeds.
This effect was apparently genotype-dependent, since the two parent lines diverged significantly in the frequency of defective plants.

XIV International Symposium on Processing Tomato

W.M. Nascimento, P.P. Silva

Solanum lycopersicum, priming, transplant production

https://doi.org/10.17660/ActaHortic.2017.1159.13