COMPARATIVE STUDY BETWEEN PEATMOSS AND RICE STRAW AS A NURSERY MEDIA

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 Central Laboratory for Agricultural Climate- Agricultural Research Center, Giza, Egypt

2 University of Rostock, Faculty of Agricultural and Environmental, Department of Waste Management and Material Flow (Germany)

Abstract

This study was carried out to investigate the possibility of using cut rice straw, as organic nursery media, compared to the traditional peatmoss, to produce seedlings for beans, cucumber, tomatoes, cantaloupe, zucchini, cabbage and lettuce. The experimental design was five treatments with three replicates each. The used substrates were the traditional peatmoss and vermiculite 1:1 (v/v) compared with mixtures between the traditional substrate and different percentage of cut rice straw (< 2 mm), from 25% up to 100% (v/v). The following parameters were measured: seedling dry weight, seedling fresh weight, seedling stem diameter, length of seedling, seedling leaf area, number of leaves, and nutrient content of the seedlings (NPK). Results revealed that the best treatment was the mixture of 50% traditional nursery substrate and the 50% rice straw mixture with traditional nursery substrate. It was concluded that cut rice straw could be used as an organic nursery media mixed with traditional one. This will help reducing environmental pollution caused by burning the huge amount of rice straw every year in Egyptian farms.

Keywords

Files

Share

How to cite

Statistics