Agro-morphological characterization of bottle gourd [Lagenaria siceraria (Mol.) Standl.] germplasms in Garo hills, Meghalaya.

The field experiment was carried out at Horticulture Farm, Department of Horticulture, North Eastern Hill University to evaluate bottle gourd germplasms for horticultural traits and to identify superior genotypes in 30 local bottle gourd genotypes during 2018 and 2019. The experiment was conducted using a randomized block design with three replications. The germplasm lines have been collected from places of Garo Hills districts of Meghalaya. The collected accessions exhibited a wide range of morphological diversity for qualitative as well as for quantitative traits. The grand mean of yield of marketable fruit (kg/plant) was 32.39 kg with the lowest fruit yield/plant of 14.87 kg recorded in GHA-18 and the highest fruit yield of 63.74 kg, fruit yield/plant recorded in GHGA-8. A wide range of variation was recorded for all the characters which indicated that there was better scope for selection for the improvement of these characters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]