Seedlings of yellow passion fruit in soils degraded by salts treated with bovine biofertilizer

Abstract

Salinity and soil sodicity promote high losses in the quality of seedlings of most commercially important plants, including yellow passion fruit. An experiment was conducted in a greenhouse environment to evalu­ate the effects of bovine biofertilizer in the emergence and morphological and physiological variables of yel­low passion fruit seedlings in an extremely sodic soil and in an extremely saline soil. The treatments were arranged in a randomized block design with three replications and six plants per plot, using a 2 × 2 factorial design referring to a saline-sodic soil and a saline soil with and without bovine biofertilizer for an evaluation in three periods: 40, 60 and 80 days after sowing. The biofertilizer was diluted in a non-saline water (ECw dS = 0.31 m^-1) in a 1:1 ratio and applied to the soil surface only once, 24 hours before sowing, with a volume corresponding to 10% of the substrate volume. The seedlings were irrigated with non-saline water, providing an evapotranspirated volume every 24 hours based on the average value obtained by the process of weigh­ing the units of each treatment. From the results, the biofertilizer more efficiently mitigated the salinity of the soil sodicity. In the treatments without organic inputs, seedlings did not emerge in the saline-sodic soil. In the saline soil, seedlings that emerged did not survive the damaging effects of salinity. Despite attenuating the degenerative effects of salinity on plants, the bovine biofertilizer contributes to the increase of saline content in the soil.