Abstract:
Rose flower contributes to Rwanda’s economy and it is distributed along the worldwide as it is a commercial crop. The quality of rose flower also contributes to the
development of the export market. Despite this contribution, profitable production
of rose flower is limited by the wilting process over time which lead to the lower
production. A study was set up to analyze if the Calcium foliar feed can reduce the
wilting rate of rose flowers across the time. The main objective of this thesis is to
analyze the impact of Calcium foliar feed on the wilting rate of rose flowers over time
using growth curve model. The data was analyzed using MATLAB R2014a and the
results show that the fitted growth curves or trends in all groups is modeled with
a second order polynomial. The results also reveal that the foliar feed 5 produces
the highest average wilting score while foliar feed 2 has the least average score. The
results also show that the wilting rate of rose flowers in all groups increase as time
of measurements increase. In addition, the results show that the wilting rate of
rose flowers are not the same in all foliar feeds over time. Moreover, foliar feed has
significant effects on the wilting process of rose flowers over time.
