Faezeh Zaefarian; Mohammad Mehdi Mirzaei; Shiva Taheri
Abstract
In order to investigate the effect of pretreatment of seeds with organic fertilizers on germination and seedling indices of three cultivar of black cumin seed, a factorial experiment was conducted in the form of a completely randomized block design in four replications in 2021. The treatments of this ...
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In order to investigate the effect of pretreatment of seeds with organic fertilizers on germination and seedling indices of three cultivar of black cumin seed, a factorial experiment was conducted in the form of a completely randomized block design in four replications in 2021. The treatments of this experiment were cultivar in three levels (Iranian, Indian and Syrian) and seed pretreatment in three levels of organic fertilizers: humic acid, biozinc and control (without pretreatment). Characteristics of germination percentage and rate, germination uniformity, root, shoot and seedling length, fresh and dry weight of root, shoot and seedling, seedling tissue water content, seedling length vigour index and allometric coefficient were measured. The results showed that the studied treatments and their interaction had a significant effect on most of the measured traits. The maximum and minimum germination percentages (93.67% and 83.33%, respectively) were allocated to Iranian and Indian cultivars; while the maximum germination uniformity (256.79 hours) was obtained in the Syrian cultivar pretreated with humic acid and the minimum germination uniformity (134.40 hours) was obtained in both Iranian cultivar without pretreatment and the Iranian cultivar pretreated with biozinc. Also, the highest seedling length and seedling length vigour index were recorded in Iranian cultivars pretreated with humic acid (4.20 cm and 400.21), respectively, and the lowest ones (1.42 cm and 113.01) in Syrian cultivar pretreated with biozinc. In general, in the present study, the effect of seed pretreatment using humic acid as organic fertilizer was positive in many germination indexes.
