Vegetative Growth and Yield Response of Amaranthus cruenthus to Arbuscular Mycorrhizal Fungi (AMF), Poultry Manure (PM), Combination of AMF-PM and Inorganic Fertilizer

Abstract

The vegetative growth and yield response of five accessions of Amaranthus cruenthus to treatments of poultry manure (PM), arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) consisting of a mixture of Glomus and Acaulospora species, combination of AMF-PM, and NPK, was evaluated at the teaching and research farm of School of Agriculture and Industrial Technology, Babcock University, between January and March 2013. The experiment was a randomized complete block design, with three replications. Data was collected on five vegetative and yield related characters. The combined analysis of variance showed significant treatment, accession and accession X treatment interaction effect, on all the characters evaluated at 0.01 and 0.05 probabilities. PM gave significantly highest total leaf weight per plant (2.483g), total root weight per plant (5.68g) and plant weight at six weeks (16.22g), while AMF-PM gave significantly highest plant height at six weeks (29.48cm) and produced leaf size that had no significant difference with NPK,Suggesting that AMF-PM could be an alternative to NPK. Furthermore accession BUAM 004 performed best in the entire yield characters evaluated and can be considered for yield improvement in Amaranthus while accession BUAM 005 was the poorest of the accessions evaluated