Agro-Morphological Characterization of Common Bean Accessions in Northern Region of Nigeria

Abstract

Despite the potentials of common bean and its production in other countries of the world, it is still poorly researched on for plant improvement when compared to cowpea and soybean, this is a huge setback as far as this research is concerned. Up till now, landraces are still being cultivated by the farmers with no definite existing seed system in Nigeria. Thirty-three common bean accessions obtained from farmers in growing regions of Northern Nigeria was used for this study. Seeds of common bean was sown In 297 bags laid out using a Complete Randomized Design to study agro-morphological traits. Qualitative (11) and quantitative (9) traits were recorded following International Board of Plant Genetic Resource common bean Descriptor list. Days to flowering (23.83 days) and days to maturity (53.83 days) was lowest in PL-01. KD-14 was the best performing accession in number of pods per plant (13.83) and KG-01 had the highest pod length (20.23 cm) and number of seeds per pod (12.50 cm). Weight of one hundred seeds (104.0 g) was highest in KD-11. Positive correlations were observed among the descriptors such as days to flowering with days to maturity (r = 0.73), pod beak length with pod length (r = 0.64) and pod length with number of seeds per pod (r = 0.79). The divergence between accessions was observed using hierarchical clustering dendrogram, at a genetic distance of 48; the accessions were grouped into 11 clusters depending on the similarity of traits considered. There is need for further studies to evaluate the characterized accessions over a period of two or more years in different locations across Nigeria to see if similar observations will be made.