Rooting potentials of leafy stem cuttings of pepper fruit (<i>Dennettia tripetala</i>) Baker, F.

Abstract

The effect of some post severance treatments on the rooting potentials of juvenile stem cuttings of Dennettia tripetala were assessed in an experiment conducted at the Physiology and Tree breeding Section’s Nursery of the Forestry Research Institute of Nigeria, Jericho, Ibadan, Oyo State, Nigeria. A total of 160 single node cuttings of D. tripetala were collected, using a Complete Randomized Design (CRD), assigned to 4 treatments namely 200 part per million (ppm) gibberellic acid (GA3), 200 ppm naphthalene acetic acid (NAA), 200 ppm indole-3-butyric acid (IBA) dissolved in industrial alcohol and a control (with no plant growth regulator) applied by dipping the base of the cuttings for 10 seconds. Although the results showed no pronounced effect of the treatments on the leaf abscission and cutting mortality at 0.05 level of probability, there was however, a significant difference in shoot formation with NAA showing a mean of 2.50 followed by control (1.75), IBA (1.50) and GA3 (1.0) respectively. Also, there were significant differences (p<0.05) in root formation, number of roots and root length with the control recording higher values than the rest of the treatments. The results, therefore, showed that it may not be necessary to use synthetic plant growth regulators used in this experiment [Indole-3-Butyric Acid (IBA), Gibberellic Acid (GA3), and Naphthalene Acetic Acid (NAA)] that is quite expensive to induce root in the cuttings of D. tripetala for mass clonal propagation as this can easily be achieved and even better without the use of any hormones.