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T omato (Lycopersicum esculentum) is a popularly grown vegetable belonging to Solanaceae family, and it ranks third in global production of vegetables The overall per anum worldwide tomato production is estimated to be more than 1.82 billion tons obtained from area of 4.8 million Abstract | Nutrient deficiency is a serious threat to tomato growth and productivity. Application of vermicompost, vermi-tea, simple compost and chemical fertilizers can help to minimize this threat. In order to combat nutrient deficiency, an experiment was carried out to optimize the best dose of fertilizers for tomato crop at Student Research Farm, Department of Agronomy, Faculty of Agriculture, University of Agriculture, Faisalabad in a tunnel under field conditions. The experiment had five treatments in which the mineral (NP) fertilizer, simple compost, earthworm's excreta-based vermicompost and vermi-tea were alone and combined in different proportions as (T 0 : control (recommended fertilizers), T 1 : 100% simple compost, T 2 : 100% vermicompost, T 3 : 100% vermi-tea, T 4 : 33% simple compost + 33% vermicompost + 34% vermi-tea and T 5 : 25% simple compost + 25% vermicompost + 25% vermi-tea+ 25% chemical fertilizers) were applied in tomato variety Aroma. The assessment was performed on the basis of morphological, yield and yield related traits (petiole length, no. of primary branches, stem diameter, time taken for flowering, time taken to fruit set, fruit diameter, fruit length, fruit weight plant -1 , plant -1 no. of fruits, plant -1 fruit yield, and yield ha -1 ) and physiological traits (membrane stability index, relative water content of leaves, total carotenoids, chlorophyll a, chlorophyll b, total chlorophyll (a+b) contents, SPAD value of chlorophyll and photosynthetic rate). The obtained results indicated that treatment T 5 had significantly (p<0.05) higher fruit yield (1.50 kg/plant, 15.5 kg/plot and 13657 kg/ha) while treatment T 0 had significantly lower fruit yield (0.87 kg/plant, 8.33 kg/plot, and 7900 kg/ha) as compared to all other treatments.
Aslam et al. (Sun,) studied this question.