CORRELATION AND PATH COEFFICIENT ANALYSIS IN SWEET PEPPER (CAPSICUM ANNUUM VAR. GROSSUM L)

Abstract

Sweet pepper is grown in summer and can be a leading off-season vegetable in Kashmir. The present study was made to determine the correlation and path coefficient analysis in a set of 21 diverse genotypes in RBD with three replication at spacing of 60 x 40 cm. The observations were recorded on ten randomly selected plants of twelve horticultural traits (Table-1). The correlation and path coefficient analysis were done according to the method suggested by Al-Jibouri et al. (1958) and Dewey and Lu (1959), respectively. The correlation results (Table 1) indicated that fruit yield had significant positive correlation with number of branches, fruit diameter, flesh thickness, fruit weight and number of seeds per fruit at both phenotypic and genotypic levels indicating that fruit yield was largely function of these traits, (Singh et al., 1981, Aliyu et al., 2000, and Ahmed et al., 1997). Correlation between number of fruits per plant and yield was non-significant and negative. This may be because large fruit number is associated with very small fruit size and less fruit weight. Significant, negative correlation of number of days to first fruit set with fruit yield per plant indicated that early varieties are high yielding ones (Nayeema et al., 1999).