Effect of Bio Fertilizer Treated Different Sized Seed Corms on Growth, Flowering and Seed Corm Production in Gladiolus (Gladiolus grandiflorus L.) cv. Picardy

A trial was conducted at Agricultural sciences Bangalore, GKVK during 2013–14 to study the effect of seed corm size on growth, yield and quality of flower and seed corm production in gladiolus. The results revealed that bigger sized corms (>4.0 cm diameter) significantly improved growth parameters viz., plant height (25.98 cm, 71.06cm and 73.36 cm at 30, 60 and 90 DAS respectively), number of leaves (4.12, 4.96and 9.46 at 15, 30 and 90 DAS respectively), leaf length and leaf width per plant (117.8 cm, 3.39 cm), and flower characters like days to spike emergence(63.45 days), days to 50% and 100% flowering (68.44 days, 84.4 days respectively) number of spikes per plant (3.93), spike length(86.73 cm), girth of spike(0.89 cm), length of rachis(44.05 cm), length of floret(8.78 cm) over medium sized (2.5 4.0 cm diameter) and small (1.0–2.5 cm diameter) sized corms. Planting of bigger sized corms resulted in the highest cut flower yield (1.2 lakh nos/ha) and corm and cormel production (2.5, 4.2 lakh nos/ha respectively).