Quality of tomato seedlings produced in substrates

Abstract

A difficulty in the production of tomato seedlings in containers is to assure the production of shoot biomass with limited portion of roots, restricted to a small volume of substrate. Therefore, we investigated if substrates associated with tomato cultivars interfere in the seedling quality. In this study, the treatments used were two tomato cultivars and three substrates. The experiment was designed in randomized blocks, with treatments arranged in a two-factorial scheme (2 x 3), with four replications. We carried out the physical and chemical characterization of the substrates and evaluated the attributes of the shoot and the root system of tomato seedlings. The results showed that the substrate with the highest water retention was Horta 2® and the lightest material was TN Gold®. Still, seedlings produced on the substrate with greater water retention capacity had higher performance in relation to the shoot morphology and the root system morphology. We conclude that the seedling quality of tomato cultivars is not associated with the studied substrates and that seedlings produced in substrate with greater water retention have better quality.