Green Pod Yield and Yield Attributing Traits of Chili (Capsicum annum L.) Genotypes in Ethiopia

The study was carried out under flood irrigation conditions at Koga irrigation site of Adet Agricultural Research Center during the off-season period from December 2018 to June 2019. Koga irrigation site is located in Mecha District of West Gojjam Administrative Zone in Amhara Region about 540 km to the North of Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia. Koga is located at 11.40N latitude and 370E longitudes, with an altitude of 1960 m a.s.l, and receives a mean annual rainfall of 1480 mm. The mean maximum and minimum temperatures of the area are 26.5OC and 8.5 OC, respectively. The topsoil of the experimental plots was heavy clay in texture with a pH of 4.5 (Denekew and Bekele 2009). For this study, four established chili varieties collected from Melkassa Agricultural Research Center (Table 1) and twenty-five chili landraces collected from the Institute of Biodiversity Conservation and Research, Ethiopia (IBCR) were used. A Randomized Complete Block Design (RCBD) with three replications of twenty-nine chili genotypes were used for the experiment (Raghavarao 1983). In the study, chili seeds were sown on a seedbed of 1.5 x 8 m2 area. Seedlings were transplanted to the experimental plot after 60 days when the seedlings attained a height of 20-25 cm. Each experimental plot had an area of 8.4 m2 (2.8 m x 3 m) and contained 40 plants in four rows of ten plants each. The spacing between rows was 70 cm and between individual plants was 30 cm. Data was recorded for 12 plant traits as described in Table 3. For the trait measurements, eight plants were randomly selected from the central rows, excluding the border rows, of each plot and tagged for data collection. Therefore, from the three replications, a total of 24 plants were measured for each trait in each genotype. The measurements were taken from those selected plants for all the characters.