Abstract
The present study is an effort to analyse the seedling vigour of S.880, S.3399 and S.1932, three robusta coffee cultivars introduced to India from Uganda, Costa Rica and Madagascar respectively, in relation to Sln.1R (S.274), a popular robusta cultivar evolved in India.
Highly significant differences were observed in seedling height, number of nodes, length of internodes, number of leaves and primary root length among the cultivars. S.1932 (Madagascar) is characterised by the shortest internodes, which is a desirable character of coffee. In S.880 (Uganda), characters like seedling height, stem girth, number of nodes, length of leaves, leaf area, number of leaves and dry weight of shoot and root showed the lowest coefficient of variation indicating the stability of the characters in the accession. Analysis of overall seedling performance also revealed the superiority of S.880 (Uganda) over the others. Correlation studies showed that stem girth of coffee is highly correlated positively to other agronomic characters.
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