Study On The Adaptability Of 54 Introduced Alfalfa Varieties In Chengdu

In this paper,the adaptability of 54 alfalfa varieties were studied on the morphological characteristics,production performance,forage nutrition and heat-tolerance, And three methods were used to evaluated their comprehensive performance.The results showed as follows:1.The result of relevant comparison between morphological characteristics and yield showed that lateral branch number of main branch,tiller number per plant,stem diameter and plant height were significantly correlated with yield of alfalfa.The 54 cultivars were clustered into 4 groups by unweighted pairwise groups method using arithmetic average (UPGMA) based on the 4 morphological indexes.Result of cluster analysis indicated that the cultivars that cluster 1 was BL-05-47 which was much better as far as the 4 botanical characteristics were concerned,and the BL-05-51 and BL-05-53 were the worst.The other cultivars were the medium.2.The production performance was different among 54 different alfalfa varieties.The varietiesBL-05-35,BL-05-32,BL-05-33,BL-05-11,BL-05-22,BL-05-09,BL-05-18,BL-05-2 3and BL-05-34 had high yield,high plant,many branches and nutrient quality was better, so these cultivars can be chosen as the key study object for the future work.Although the varieties BL-05- 25,BL-05-14,BL-05-40 and BL-05-19 also had higher yields,its high stem-leaf ration and lower crud protein content caused their quality decreased;The varieties BL-05-52 had high yield but the height of plant was low,Varieties of BL-05-20, BL-05-21,BL-05-29,BL-05-13,BL-05-46,BL-05- 45,BL-05- 44 and BL-05- 43 showed the poor adaptability for these varieties had the lowest yield,lower height-plant,few branching and worse quality,and the other varieties had the medium production performance.3.The production performance of 54 alfalfa cultivars was comprehensive evaluated based on the gray systemic theory.Alfalfa's production performance was associated to the relational coefficients.The relation coefficients is higher,the production performance of alfalfa is better.A According to the relational coefficients sorting,the varieties of BL-05-35, BL-05-32,BL-05-33,BL-05-09 and BL-05-11 showed the better production performance. And the last ten were the varieties of BL-05-54,BL-05-21,BL-05-20,BL-05-10, BL-05-45,BL-05-46,BL-05-13,BL-05-30,BL-05-43 and BL-05-44,which had worse production performance and not suited to been introduced in this area.4.In this experiment the heat-tolerance of eight alfalfa cultivars of different types fall dormancy,including two types of FD-1,three types of FD-5 and three types of FD-9,were studied also.The relative conductivity,MDA content and peroxidase activity were chosen to evaluated the heat-tolerance of the eight alfalfa varieties.The results showed as:the order of heat-tolerance of the eight alfalfa cultivars was BL-05-25(FD-9)＞BL-05-12(FD-5)＞BL-05-44(FD-1)＞BL-05-36(FD-5)＞BL-05-49(FD-1)＞BL-05-40(FD-9)＞BL-05-41(FD-5)＞BL-05-31(FD-9).This result indicated that there were no positive connection with the the heat-tolerance of alfalfa between its fall dormancy.