Optimizing Hydroponic Management Practices for Organically Grown Greenhouse Tomato under Abiotic Stress Conditions

Summary

Hot and humid conditions create challenges for tomato production under a controlled environment. Low tomato productivity is related to the lack of stress tolerance of existing cultivars and their ability to maximize fruit set and yield. The aim of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of three management strategies, cultivar selection, grafting, and plant density, for the growth and production efficiency of organically grown hydroponic tomatoes under adverse environmental conditions in Qatar. The experiment used a split-split plot design with ‘Velocity F1’ and ‘Sigma F1’ as the main plot treatments and a factorial arrangement of grafting combinations and planting densities (3.5 and 5.5 plants/m 2) as subplots. Tomato cultivar Velocity F1 grafted on Maxifort F1 resulted in greater ve