Influence of spacing between plants on agronomic characteristics of two late-cycled vegetable soybean genotypes in Jaboticabal, state of São Paulo, Brazil

Abstract

The aim of this work was to evaluate the influence of spacing between plants on some agronomic characteristics of two genotypes of late-cycled vegetable soybeans in Jaboticabal, state of São Paulo, Brazil. The experiment was conducted in the field lasting from September 15, 2005 to January 10, 2006. It was conducted in the experimental area of the Sector of Vegetable and Aromatic Medicinal Plants, belonging to the Department of Crop Sciences, College of Agricultural and Veterinary Sci­ences. The experimental setup was that of a randomized complete block design with subdivided plots, the treatments consisting of two genotypes and three spacing between plants, the genotypes forming the plots and the plant spacings the subplots. Plots comprised four 4.5 m long rows, with distances between plants in the row of 0.05 m, 0.10 m, and 0.15 m and 0.60 m between rows. Twenty plants per plot were randomly taken for evaluations. Seedlings were grown by sowing seeds in trays consisting of 128 cells containing the commercial substrate Plantmax Hortaliças® HT. A previ­ously inoculated (500 g of the Badyrhizobium spp inoculant to each 50 kilograms of seeds) seed was placed in each cell. Ten days after sowing, the resulting seedlings were transplanted. The two geno­types used were: JLM003 and JLM018. First pod insertion height, number of pods per plant, num­ber of seeds per pod, fresh weight of pods per plant, fresh weight of 100 seeds, productivity per plant, and total estimated yield of immature grains were measured. Results showed the JLM003 to be the best genotype for vegetable soybean production due to its having a larger number of grains and that the best spacing between plants was of 0.15 m.

Additional keywords: Glycine max; density; quality; yield.