Combination of organic liquid fertilizer and sea weed extract enhances the tomato growth, yield and photosynthetic attributes under hydroponic system

Abstract

Tomato is popular hydroponic crop cultivated predominantly with Albert solution. However, the recent trend in increased demand for organic agriculture warrants the need of alternative green liquid fertilizers as opposed to inorganic solution. Therefore, this study intended to investigate the effects of tomato photosynthetic, growth and yield performance supplemented with a simple and organic liquid fertilizer (OLF) prepared from home garden wastes through natural anaerobic fermentation using compost, goat manure, wild sunflower leaves, and banana peels supplemented with brown sugar (25 g/l). Anaerobic fermentation was allowed for up to 30 days. The prepared OLF was used to arrange five OLF treatments T1 (OLF, pH-5.5-6.5), T2 (OLF, pH-6.5-7.5), T3 (OLF, SWE, pH-5.5-6.5), T4 (OLF, SWE, pH-6.5-7.5), T5 (OLF, pH-5.5-6.5, MOP) and in addition, T6 - control (1000 ppm Albert solution, pH-5.5-6.5) with Albert solution were maintained in a plant net house facility. Tomato variety cv. Platina was used characterize the vegetative, floral, photosynthesis, and yield traits. Our results indicated that the nutrient levels were significantly higher at 15 days after fermentation, and highest nitrogen and phosphorus were obtained in the liquid solution. Tomato trial revealed that T6 (control) had significantly (P<0.05) increased performance on leaf area (372 cm2 ), plant height (166cm) photosynthetic rates (18.9) and chlorophyll content (58.0 SPAD) and increased number of fruit set (13 fruits /plant) as opposed to other treatments. However, the T3 produced the highest performances among the OLF treatment. With those findings, T6 (Albert solution, control) produced highest total fruit yield (701g/plant) followed by T3 (557g/plant), suggesting that the treatments supplemented with Albert solution outperforms photosynthetic, growth and yield characters in tomato. However, the T3 showed the second highest performance among the treatments, Hence T3 can be proposed as an alternative organic liquid solution for cultivation of hydroponic tomato.