Growth and Yield Performance of Tomato (Lycopersicum esculentum L.) at Different Building Heights of Rooftop Gardening

Abstract

Rooftop gardening is very important for food security and environmental restoration, but if it is not economically feasible on the basis of productivity than rooftop gardening will not increase and sustain. To know the productivity at different heights of buildings roof, an experiment was conducted at the ground and the rooftop of different buildings at Sher-e-Bangla Agricultural University, Dhaka within a seven months period spanning through dry and rainy seasons. The experiment was laid out in a Completely Randomized Design with four replications containing four pots in each replicate. The plant material was BARI Tomato -14 and treatments of this experiment were T1= Control (Ground level, 0.0 m), T2= Rooftop of three storied building (11.28 m), T3 = Rooftop of six storied building (21.34 m), T4 = Rooftop of ten storied building (34.75 m). Different height of buildings rooftop showed significant effects on the air temperature, moisture of pot soil, growth, yield contributing characters and yield of tomato. The treatment T1 showed significantly higher moisture content of pot soil, plant height, plant stem diameter, branch number per plant, leaf number per plant, flower cluster number per plant, fruit number per plant, fruit length, fruit diameter, individual fruit weight and yield per plant than all other treatments but T4 showed significantly lowest results in all the above mentioned characters and Vice versa in case of air temperature. Growth and yield of tomato showed a gradually decreasing results with the increasing of buildings rooftop height. The sequence of growth and yield of tomato were T1>T2>T3>T4.