Abstract

Potato farmers in India and other developing countries lack timely availability of healthy and good quality potato seed tubers. This is mainly due to conventional seed multiplication techniques which, has suffered inheritantly from low multiplication rates. The soil medium is generally used for seed tuber production. In order to overcome bottlenecks, a study was conducted to evaluate mini-tuber production potential for selected baskets of potato varieties in different soil-less solid media types compared with soil as control. Soil-less media technique would also assist in planning for economical and rapid seed multiplication program, along with pathogen free seed tubers, which will increase production of good quality reliable seed material in the country. This will finally ensure increased productivity of potato crop. With these objectives, an experiment was conducted during the years, 2015 - 2016 and 2016 - 2017. Three different soil-less solid propagation media (kalpeat plus, soilrite mix and soilrite mix TC) were tested against control (soil: sand 3:1); for five different varieties (1001, 1002, 1003, 1004 and 1005). Plantlets grown on soilrite mix performed better with higher mini-tuber yield of 548.58 gm/container (1/2 m²), while for other propagation media, 283.39 gm/ container (1/2 m²), 96.08 gm/ container (1/2 m²), and 52.61 gm/ container (1/2 m²) respectively, were observed for kalpeat plus, soilrite mix TC and control (soil: sand 3:1) respectively. Among the varieties tested, viz., 1005 and 1004 produced maximum mini-tubers, between 9 tubers /plant and 5 tubers /plant respectively. Soilrite mix increased the number and size of mini-tubers. Thus, this study concluded that soil-less solid media induced seed potato multiplication is better than traditional soil based techniques.

Key words: Potato seed tuber, soil-less solid media.