| dc.description.abstract | Vegetable production greatly contributes towards income, food and nutritional security of millions of people worldwide. Seedling quality is a fundamental requirement for achieving full yield potential of any vegetable crop and this has been achieved through use of peat moss in raising seedlings. Though peatmoss has been known for long as a standard inoculum carrier used by horticultural nursery operators, an increasing public concern around the globe has developed over its use as a growth media, primarily due to ecological concerns such as; wetland destruction during its harvest, and triggering greenhouse gas accumulation. This therefore calls for the need to search for a cost-effective, eco-friendly nursery production technology with the potential of increasing on transplant numbers without compromising quality. The experimental design was a randomized complete design (RCD) in a split plot arrangement, and replicated three times with crop (3- levels) as the whole plot factor and peat replacement rates (4-levels) as the sub-plot factor. Data was collected on seedling height, collar diameter and leaf area of each of the 5 random samples obtained from each sub-plot at every given phase of data collection. Replacing peat with 20% biochar had no significant effect compared to the control (100% peat moss) in each of the crops. However, a mixture of 80% peat moss + 20% biochar (T2) resulted in to a higher seedling height (49.2 mm) though not significantly different from that for the control (48.71 mm) but significantly different from that for 60% peat moss + 40% biochar (T3) (43.07 mm) and 40% peat moss + 60% biochar (T4) (36.47 mm) in each of the crops. Partial replacement of peat moss with biochar had a significant effect (p < 0.05) on the collar diameter of tomato, cabbage and capsicum seedlings (Table 2). A mixture of 80% peat moss + 20% biochar (T2) resulted in to a higher seedling height (0.98 mm) though not significantly different from that for the control (0.96 mm) but significantly different from that for 60% peat moss + 40% biochar (T3) (0.88 mm) and 40% peat moss + 60% biochar (T4) (0.78 mm). Partial replacement of peat moss with biochar had a significant (p< 0.05) effect on the natural logarithm of leaf area of tomato, cabbage and capsicum seedlings (Table 2). A mixture of 80% peat moss + 20% biochar (T2) resulted in to a higher seedling height (0.77 mm) though not significantly different from that for the control (0.76 mm) but significantly different from that for 60% peat moss + 40% biochar (T3) (0.68 mm) and 40% peat moss + 60% biochar (T4) (0.52 mm). | en_US |
