Effect of soils extracted at different depth on incidence of damping off and growth performance of vegetable seedlings: a case of tomato and eggplant

Abstract

Vegetables are crops of great importance both to the farmer and the government due to the great contribution to the livelihood of a great number of people through its entire value chain and the economy at large. Despite their great contributions their growth is faced by constraints such as environmental, post-harvest handling and biotic constraints which include pests and diseases. Damping off disease is one of the diseases that causes a great loss to vegetable production in the whole world to about 80% if not management and the existing management control measures of damping off are very expensive and require a lot of technical knowledge for their adoption and also have health and environmental hazards. Therefore, this research that was entitled incidence of vegetable damping in soils extracted from different layers intended to provide an alternative method that is cost effective. health and environmentally friendly for growing vegetables.an experiment to investigate the incidence of damping off in different soil layers was setup in a screen house in MUARIK Kabanyoro using tomato and eggplant as the study vegetables. The experiment was setup in a randomised complete block design (RCBD) in split plots. Data was collected on a weekly basis for one month on parameters such as height, weight, leaf length and root score emergency percentage survival percentage and percentage germination. The data was subjected to analysis of variance (ANOVA) using GENSTAT program and the treatment means were separated using least significance test (LSD) test at 5% probability levels. The results revealed that soil depth and sterility status of the soil have significant effect(P<0.05) on all growth parameters of seedling height, weight, leaf length and root system development that is to say growth decreased with increase in depth and also growth was high in sterilized soils than in unsterilized soils and also soil sterility has a significant effect on the growth performance of the seedlings.