Impact of Sowing Dates and Planting densities on yield and quality of Sugar beet

Abstract

3 Dakahlia Sugar Company, Cairo, Egypt. wael.elbialy@yahoo.com ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــــ Abstract Sugar beet (Beta vulgaris L.) is the second source of sugar all over the world. A field experiment was carried out during the 2019/2020 and 2020/2021 growing seasons to study the performance of two sugar beet varieties under three planting densities and three planting dates. Planting densities, planting dates and varieties as well as their interactions exhibited significant effects on all studied traits including, root length and diameter, root and top yields, sucrose content, impurities%, quality index (Qz), recoverable sugar (RS)%, and recoverable sugar yield (RSY). The highest root length and diameter from planting sugar beet at a density of 28,000 plants/feddan (Feddan = 4200 m2) in both growing seasons. Meanwhile, the highest values of the remaining studied traits were produced from cultivating sugar beet at 42,000 plants/ feddan Superiority in all studied traits was scored to the September 25th planting date. The variety Hercules surpassed the Husam variety in all the measured desirable traits in both growing seasons. Moreover, the variety Hercules produced the highest values of root and top yields, sucrose content, impurities%, quality index (Qz), recoverable sugar (RS)% and recoverable sugar yield (RSY) when planted at a planting density of 42,000 plants/ feddan on September 25th in both growing seasons.