Effect of Organic Liquid Vermicompost as a Substitute for Chemical Fertilizer on Morphological and Biochemical Characteristics in Lettuce.

Abstract

The use of organic vermicompost fertilizers is considered one of the promising fertilizer. Therefore, the experiment aimed to study the effect of using liquid vermicompost fertilizer as an alternative to chemical fertilizers in the production of lettuce, Crisp head variety. In this study, a field experiment was conducted during the two winter seasons of 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 at the Agricultural Research Station in the Abies region, affiliated to the Faculty of Agriculture, Alexandria University Egypt. This experiment aimed to evaluate the response of lettuce plants to the application of liquid vermicompost (LVC) fertilizer through four different concentrations (2.5%, 5%, 10%, and 20%), and the chemical fertilization treatment (100% NPK) in the recommended rate as a control treatment for lettuce production, on some vegetative growth characters; Fresh weight plant-1 (kg), head net weight plant-1 (kg), total yield fed-1 (ton), and unmarketable yield fed-1 (ton), in addition to some biochemical characteristics; vitamin C, dry matter, total soluble solids, and carbohydrates as well as estimate the element content and quality elements, such as nitrogen (N+), potassium (K+), phosphorus (P+), calcium (Ca2+), magnesium (Mg2+), and iron (Fe2+). The results showed a gradual significant increasing in the values of most of the studied traits by increasing the concentrations of vermicompost fertilizer from 2.5 % to 20%. The application of vermicompost treatment with a concentration of 20% LVC gave the highest significant values for most of the studied traits without a clear significant difference compared to the chemical fertilizer 100% NPK.