Phenotypic correlations involving flowering and yielding periods in difterent herbaceous cotton strains.

Abstract

Earliness of crop maturity is one of the objectives in the Northeast Brazil for cotton breeding of Gossypium lursutum L. r. latifolium Hutch. One of the methods used as estimator for that characteristic in progenies is daily counts of blooming flowers for a twenty-day period after the tirst bloom, assuming that the greater is the number of flowers in this period the sooner is going to come the fruiting time. The total of flowers in twenty days is called T20 . In this study the phenotypic correlation between short flowering intervals (established among T20) was investigated in order to determine whether these short counting periods would have the same efficiency of the full counting during twenty days, making this evaluation process easier. F3 progenies rows from five crosses between early maturing cultivars were used. It was concluded that there are short counting intervals among the twenty days of whose correlations with the total of flowers in this period and of T20 with yielding are low but significant in most cases.