505 Quality of Pepper Seed Production Depending on Fruit Position on the Mother Plant N. Panayotov a Agricultural University 12 “Mendeleev” Str. 4 000 Plovdiv Bulgaria Keywords: sowing quality, pepper, seed position, germinability, vigour, heterogeneity, viability Abstract The main purpose of the present study was to establish the differences in sowing quality of pepper seeds depending on the fruit position on the mother plant. The experiments were carried out with two typical Bulgarian pepper cultivars – ‘Kurtovska kapia 1619’ and ‘Bulgarski rotund’. The seeds were extracted when they reached the botanical maturity separately from the first and the second layers and also simultaneously from both layers when the upper (second) layer maturated. The dry matter of fruits and seeds, energy of germination, germinability, fresh matter of sprouts, weight of 1000 seeds, length of the embryo root and hypocotyl were investigated. The cultivar differences were observed. Germination energy and germinability for ‘Kurtovska kapia 1619’ were the highest in the second layer seeds, while for ‘Bulgarski rotund’ – in the first layer, harvested together with the fruit from the second one. Those results suggest that it is appropriate to divide the pepper seed from the different layers in separate lots of different quality. INTRODUCTION The seed formation and development are associated with the specific characteristics of flowering, pollination, growth technology and their relationships with the vegetative plant parts and environmental conditions. It is determined by the time of floral part initiation and their place on the mother plant, which preconditions the formation of seeds with different qualitative parameters even in a single plant. The climatic conditions also exert influence on the seed heterogeneity. In this sense, there are three types of quality differences – genetic, maternal and ecological (Panayotov, 2005). Seed heterogeneity is manifested very strongly in the vegetables crops. Those crops are usually characterized by a long period of vegetation and flowering and in this aspect the seed quality differences due to the different position on the mother plant are basic. In vegetable crops this phenomenon has been very well investigated in biennial species. The carrot seeds from primary and secondary umbels had higher germinability and developed larger seeds than those from tertiary umbels (Corbineau et al., 1995). Similar information was also reported by other authors (Shantha et al., 1999; Satyaveer et al., 1994). However, some researchers made the opposite conclusions as they found the best quality in carrot seeds from tertiary umbels (Elballa and Cantliffe, 1997). The onion seeds from umbels flowering 11–12 days after the primary ones, i.e. from secondary and tertiary umbels, were of best quality (Dudhe et al., 1996). In the experiment with another vegetable crop – cucumber – Jing et al. (2000) pointed out that the qualitative differences depended on the one hand on fruit position on the mother plant, and on the other, on seed position inside the cucumber fruit. The seeds from the fruit top and from the fruit peduncular segments delayed in reaching maximum quality compared to seeds from other positions. The different seed quality was determined by the different position of pea fruit on the mother plant and of the seeds, respectively. The differences were bigger for seeds from the upper nodes of the branches of the pea a nikpan@au-plovdiv.bg Proc. IV th Balkan Symp. on Vegetables and Potatoes Eds.: L. Krasteva and N. Panayotov Acta Hort. 830, ISHS 2009