ASSOCIATION STUDY OF YIELD AND ITS COMPONENTS IN PEA (PISUM SATIVUM L.)

Field pea is the third most important grain legume globally after beans and chickpea. The present study was conducted during the period 2012-2014 at the Institute of Forage crops, Bulgaria, with five pea genotypes. The conducted analyses revealed that the genetic correlations for most of the traits in field pea have higher coefficients than the phenotypic correlations. The strongest positive phenotypic correlations were found between plant height with pods per plant (r=0.780); pods per plant with seed per plant (r=0.863) and seed weight per plant (r=0.796); seed per plant with seed weight per plant (r=0.733). The highest genetic correlations were established between plant height with seed per plant(r = 0.612) and pods per plant (r=0.798); pods per plant with seed per plant (r=0.866) and seed weight per plant (r=0.796); seed per plant with seed weight per plant (r=0.722). The strongest and direct positive effects over grain yield had pod stem (2991.134), seeds per plant (448.314) and pods per plant (99.261). Based on the trait association and the path coefficients for seed yield ant its components, it could be concluded that pea breeders should pay attention to the traits as pod stem, seeds per plant, pods per plant and 1000 seed weight at selecting high-yielding genotypes.