Growth Performance of Eggplant (Solanum melongena L.) Enhanced by Watering Intervals and Application of Organic Manure

Abstract

Eggplant (Solanum melongena L.) is one of the high-value vegetable crops grown in the world because of its yield, and nutritional benefits to the consumers. Eggplant grows on different soils of sandy loams and clay loams. In agronomy water is an essential element for plant growth and maintenance of tissues and organs. Eggplant requires less water and the importance of water management is to enhance water stress of plant growth and to maintain turgidity and flaccidity of tissues while organic application improves on yield and self-life of produce. The field experiment was Randomized Complete Block Design (RCBD) of 4 replicates. Treatment/replicates has twenty-four 24 beds with a total number of ninety-six (96) beds. The research objective was to determine the levels watering intervals on plant height, fruit number, stem diameter, fruit weight and yield. Statistical Analysis One-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) used to determine the significant differences among treatments. The result in Table 1 shows plant height of 18.3, 21.0, 31.6, and 23.4 cm respectively. The data analysis shows that, number of fruit diameter registered was in T4 of 35 cm followed by T3 of 25 cm while in T1 the fruit diameter was 20.0 cm. The results in Table 2 indicates that, water application at intervals of 3 days obtained the highest mean values of 6.0 a and fruit diameter of 2.5 b. In conclusion, the study reveals that, watering at intervals of 3 days was the best agronomic practices in obtaining maximum crop physiology and better yields. Thus, recommending more research work on watering intervals of eggplants varieties.