Abstract

Landraces and local varieties are repository sources of novel alleles and they are highly adapted to prevailing climatic conditions. Thus, can be a source for yield and quality contributing characters as well as for biotic and abiotic stress resistance breeding programmes. The present study was carried out during kharif, 2019 at Agricultural College and Research Institute, Tamil Nadu Agricultural University, Madurai, Tamil Nadu, India with eighteen cucumber genotypes (local varieties and landraces) characterized for twentythree qualitative traits and a high yielding local variety as a check. Significant variations among the genotypes was observed for characters viz., leaf blade size, trichome density, colour of the leaf, fruit colour at maturity, secondary fruit pattern and skin colour at ripening. However, limited source of variation was identified for plant growth habit, leaf margin, stem shape and leaf trichome type. The cluster analysis and correlation were performed through the ‘R’ software and it clustered the eighteen genotypes into two clusters. Cluster I has one genotype and remaining seventeen genotypes were found in Cluster II. Correlation analysis identified, strong correlation between the leaf glossiness and fruit shape (r = 0.77). Similarly, leaf blade size (r = 0.68) and leaf shape (r = 0.31) were positively correlated with fruit shape. Morphological characterization eliminated the inferior genotypes. Cluster analysis identified the genetic distance between the genotypes. Thus, selection of genotypes with characters correlated to fruit shape and skin colour of fruit increased the genotype selection efficiency towards economic quality of cucumber.