Performance of Indian spinach under different combinations of organic and inorganic fertilizers

Soil health is deteriorate due to excessive use of inorganic fertilizer during crop production. Moving crop production to sole inorganic to organic and inorganic combination may improve soil health. Solely organic crop production in Bangladesh presents some challenges, however, including the stunting, and lower crop growth and yield. In order to address the problem of excessive use of inorganic fertilizer, different combinations of organic or inorganic fertilizer were tested in Indian spinach production. There is no recommended ideal combination of organic and inorganic fertilizer for Indian spinach production in Bangladesh. For that reason, the goal of the present research was to identify the effect of organic and inorganic fertilizer in Indian spinach production. The specific objective was to determine the ideal combination of organic and inorganic fertilizer for Indian spinach production. A field experiment was conducted in the Germplasm center of Agrotechnology Discipline of Khulna University, Khulna (AEZ-13) during May to September, 2014 in a Randomized Complete Block Design (RCBD) with three replications. There were eleven treatments combination tested for this experiments. Water hyacinth (WH), farm yard manure (FYM), cow dung (CD) and poultry liter (PL) were used as an organic manure source in different combination and Urea, TSP and MoP (NPK) was used for inorganic source of fertilizer. Effect of recommended NPK fertilizers was observed to be more effective as produced highest number of branches plant-1, number of leaves plant-1, length of leaves, breadth of leaves and harvested yield although which is not good for soil health. However, (50% FYM + 50% CD) and (50% PL + 50% CD) gave the highest plant height and diameter, respectively. In context of yield parameter, the highest yield of Indian spinach was found at recommended NPK fertilizers followed by (50% FYM + 50% CD), (50% PL + 50% FYM) and (50% PL + 50% CD), respectively. Therefore, application of organic manures in combination of (50% FYM + 50% CD), (50% PL + 50% FYM) and (50% PL + 50% CD), respectively showed better performance in terms of yield parameters and yield of Indian spinach after recommended NPK fertilizers.

• Supervision