Quality of strawberry seedlings can determine precocity

Abstract

The development of day-neutral (DN) strawberry cultivars and their relationship with the quality of strawberry seedlings are important for the identification of precocity, ie. early flowering and fruiting. This study aimed to test whether the variability between morphoagronomic DN strawberry cultivars is associated with precocity. The treatments were four cultivars of strawberry (Albion, Aromas, Portola and San Andreas), and three plant crown diameters (B 8 mm, A between 8.1 and 12 mm and A+ 12 mm). The design was completely randomized with five replications under split plot scheme. The plants were grown in plastic containers filled with commercial substrate. The analyzed variables were the phenological stages, thermal sum accumulated (TSa) and phyllochron. The phenological data were submitted to multivariate analysis. The phyllochron (C day leaf -1