Determination of Emergence and Seedling Characteristics in One- and Two-Year Seeds of Some Long-Day Onion (Allium cepa L.) Varieties

The most important factors are the seed quality and vigor in which determine the yield and quality of vegetable production. Seed quality is affected by many factors such as seed development on the mother plant, genetic characters of species, and variety, storage conditions, etc. Onion (Allium cepa L.) has a seed that is easily deteriorating. Therefore one-year seed use is commonly recommended. In this research, which was conducted to determine the effect of the production year and variety on seed emergence and seedling properties was used oneand the two-year seed of four long-day variety (denotes A, B, C or D). As result, it was determined that the seedling morphological characters were not affected by production year and one-year seeds had a higher emergence percentage and vigor index than two-year seeds. The highest emergence rates were seen in variety D (95.50%) for one-year seeds and in variety A (80.00%) for two-year seeds. Among vigor indexes, the highest values were observed in variety C (2.85) for one-year seeds and variety A (2.39) for two-year seeds. Also, seed viability and viability decreasing rate were different according to varieties.