The 'jiló' plant is a typical horticultural crop with a high thermal and water requirement with a bitter flavor fruit and possessing economical importance in several regions of Brazil. The objective of the study was to develop and to validate models for forecasting phenometric vegetative characteristics as the crop height, dry and fresh biomass of the aerial part, number of leaves and leaf area per plant and also the ones related directly to the production as the accumulated number of fruits (NFRUTOS) and accumulated production per plant (PAP), in function of thermal index for four cultivars of 'jiló', being two commercial and two introduced by IAC. The thermal index allowed good adjustments of the linear regressions presenting high values of R2 for most of the characteristics of interest. The validation of the equations was made with data of the second productive year for cultivar Cardoso and Bernacci for the characteristics NFRUTOS and PAP presenting good agreement due to the high values of R2 and all inside the interval of confidence of 95% of probability. The presented method, after adjusted for specific cultivar, can be used as important tool to estimate beginning and duration of phenological stages as well as final yield of crop.
Solanum gilo Raddi; regression; temperature; degree-days; fenology
