Abstract
Efficient water management in agricultural sector necessitates the manipulation of all possible options for water supply and demand management methods. The purpose of this study was to determine the usefulness of using natural volcanic tuff as a soil mulching on plant and soil properties under different water levels. The experiments were performed using 1-year-old olive transplants planted in barrels filled with silty clay soil. Half of the barrels were covered with a coarse volcanic tuff, while the other samples were remained without covering and considered as control. The two sets of barrels were irrigated with four levels of water which correspond to 75%, 65%, 55%, and 45% of the field capacity. The treatments were arranged in a randomized complete block design with three replications. Results revealed that plant height, number of branches, trunk diameter, shoots length, shoot diameter, number of leaves, and plant weight for soil covered with volcanic tuff were significantly greater than control plants after the fifth growing season. The leaf water potential and relative water content of plants grown in mulched soil were significantly greater than those of control. An increase in nutrient contents of soil and plant tissues was found as a result of soil amendment with volcanic tuff. In summary, a positive influence of volcanic tuff additions on olive growth, leaves water status, and soil nutrient levels was determined.
Highlights
Water and food are the most important needs for life survival
The effect of natural volcanic tuff as a mulching on plant growth and soil chemistry was determined under different water stress levels (75%, 65%, 55%, and 45%)
In comparison with S1W1, S1W4 showed a significant reduction in the number of branches, trunk diameter, shoot length, shoot diameter, number of leaves, and plant weight up to 32%, 27%, 38%, 33%, 48%, and 30%, respectively, indicating a high impact of water stress on the plant growth
Summary
Water and food are the most important needs for life survival. Providing both products for the consumers has the highest priority and is the main challenge for global economy. Several techniques have been adopted to reduce water evaporation from agricultural soil such as tillage, welldesigned drip, trickle irrigation system, windbreak, weed control, anti-transparent (stomata closing, film-forming type, and growth retardant), and mulching (McMillen 2013). Mulching is the most widely used method to control evaporation from soil. In addition to evaporation reduction, the mulch layer has many other benefits such as prevention of growth of weed seedling, reduction in soil salinity, erosion, and impact of some diseases, and moderation of temperature (McMillen 2013). The new generation of researches turns toward using natural low-cost materials such as agricultural waste, zeolite, and volcanic tuff
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