Study on morpho-physico traits of strawberry (Fragaria ananasa Duch.) cultivars under open and protected condition

Strawberry is one of the most important crops which gained attention and popularized within a short period of time due to its attractive colour, aroma and taste. But due to insufficient information regarding its growing conditions, varieties and other essential cultivation practices farmers were not been able to come out with encouraging results. Keeping this in view, an experiment has been undertaken to evaluate the performance of various Strawberry cultivars namely Sabrina, Winter Dawn, Chandler, Sweet Charlie, Cristal, Selva and Camarosa with different dates of planting like 1st November, 15th November, 1st December and 15th December under open conditions and fifty percent shade net conditions. Results revealed that the variety Winter Dawn has been found to have the maximum value for Plant height (17.00 cm and 16.17 cm), Number of leaves at flowering (14.25 and 11.50), Leaf area (64.67 sq. cm and 62.33 sq.cm), Number of crowns per plant (3.25 and 3.00), Number of fruits per plant (12.92 and 11.25), Fruit weight (14.69g and 13.49g), Fruit diameter (3.57 cm and 3.45 cm), Fruit length (3.82 cm and 3.68 cm) and Fruit production (231.33 g per plant and 207.83 g per plant) in open conditions as well as in 50 percent shade net conditions. In addition, the variety Winter Dawn took least number of days to first flowering (22.25 days and 27.75 days) and days from flowering to maturity of fruits (26.00 days and 27.08 days) in both the growing conditions. Whereas, the best planting time found was the 15th of November with maximum values of all the parameters.