Thesis (Ph.D.) - Cairo University - Faculty of Agriculture - Department of Vegetable

This investigation was carried out at the Agricultural Experimental Station, Faculty of Agriculture, Cairo University, Giza, Egypt during the two successive winter seasons of 2014 and 2015. This study included two individual experiments, the first one was to study the effect of three sowing dates (15th July, 15th August and 15th September), three F1 cultivars (Marathon F1, Heraklion F1 and Centauro F1) and their interactions on growth, yield, quality, and sulforaphan content of broccoli, while the second experiment was to study the effect of nutrient elements (potassium 96 kg/fed, k₂O, sulphur 150 kg S/fed, zinc 200 ppm and nitric oxide 100 ppm plus the control), Three F1 cultivars (Marathon F1, Heraklion F1 and Centauro F1) and their interactions on growth, yield, quality, and sulforaphan content of broccoli. The experimental design for both experiments was a split plot with 3 replicates. The results of the first experiment, Showed that plant growth, yield and quality of heads were greatly affected by the three cultivars in the three sowing dates. In this respect, second sowing date (15th August) gave the highest values of most vegetative growth traits, expressed as number of leaves, leaf area, total fresh weight/plant and main head and total heads yield/plot and /fed. "Marathon F1" gave the highest values of most vegetative growth characteristics, while "Centauro F1" was superior in the total head yield/ plot and feddan and sulforaphane content. In the second experiment, "Marathon F1" cultivar gave the highest values of vegetative growth traits expressed as plant height and number of leaves per plant, while the highest leaf area and total fresh weight of plant were recorded with "Centauro F1" in both seasons.

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