Growth Response of Coffee (Coffea Arabica L.) Cultivars to Various Transplanting Methods at Bonga, South Western Ethiopia

Abstract

The use of an appropriate transplanting techniques and polythene bags (pot sizes) for cultivars vary from place to place due to lack of information based technology. Therefore, there is a need to determine area specific transplanting techniques for available cultivars. Accordingly, an experiment was conducted to evaluate the growth response of Coffee arabica cultivars to transplanting methods at Bonga South Western Ethiopia, in 2012/2013 cropping season. The first set of experiment encompasses two experiment factors that were two transplanting methods (bare rooted and ball rooted) and six (Coffea arabica L.) cultivars (75227, 741, 7440, Dessu, 74110 and 74112); their factorial combination was tested using randomized complete block design with three replications. Bare root transplanting methods significantly(p<0.05) increase seedling vigor indices at first true leaf, leaf area index (LAI), internodes length, plant height and root volume (RV) and total biomass (TDW) at early growth stage of Arabica coffee seedlings, however it showed lower survival percentage  (52.20% )  after field transplanting. On the other hand, Seedling growth parameters; number of leaf, LAI, plant height, stem girth, root volume and TDW were significantly (p<0.05) influenced by arabica coffee genotypes. TDW increases from 2.65 g and 2.65 g/ seedling to 3.51 g and 3.50 g /seedling for 75227 and 741 open Arabica cultivars, respectively, however, open Arabica coffee cultivar (741) was  revealed lower field survival percentage (48.83% ) after field transplanting. Generally, coffee seedling grown under ball rooted transplanting methods were found under good growth performance (93.06% ) after field transplanting.  Therefore, among the studied Arabica coffee cultivars 7410, 74112, Dessue and 75227 could be recommended to be raised on ball rooted transplanting methods as an agronomical feasible choice for the study area.

Key words: coffee, transplanting, cultivar, relative growth rate, seedling, survival rate.