PHYSICAL AND CHEMICAL PROPERTIES OF SOME SOILLESS MEDIA

Sabahy, Amr; Bhansawi, Adel; Ali, Samir; El-Haddad, Zakaria

doi:10.21608/mjae.2015.98740

PHYSICAL AND CHEMICAL PROPERTIES OF SOME SOILLESS MEDIA

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

¹ Researcher Assoc., Agric. Eng. Res. Inst., Agric. Res. Center, Egypt.

² Prof. of Agric. Eng., Fac. of Agric., Benha Univ., Egypt.

10.21608/mjae.2015.98740

Abstract

Soilless culture is a technique for crop production using no soil. Crops are grown in the nutrient solution or on a proper medium, therefore, soilless culture involves no work such tools or machines. But it needs additional costs for growing systems and chemical fertilizes. It offers earlier growth and higher yield. Lack of suitable soils, disease contamination after repeated use and the desire to apply optimal conditions for plant growth are leading to the worldwide trend of growing plant in media instead of soil characterization of these medium is not available in literature, therefore, the main aim of this work is to investigate the physical and chemical properties (light peat, vermiculite, perlite, dark peat, light peat and perlite (70:30) and light peat and vermiculite (50:50)) that meets the requirement of plant growth. These properties include: bulk density, moisture content, water holding capacity, porosity, pH, electrical conductivity (EC), total organic carbon, total organic matter, total nitrogen, total phosphorus, total potassium and C/N ratio.
The results indicate that the bulk density value ranged from 95.7 to 125.8 kg m^-3, where, the highest value was recorded for perlite and the lowest value was recorded for dark peat. The moisture content values ranged from 23.30 to 32.50 %, where, the lowest value was recorded for perlite and the highest value was obtained for dark peat. The water holding capacity values ranged from 2.70 to 4.40 g water/g dry. The porosity values ranged from 87.0 to 92.0 % for different soilless media. The average of pH, EC, organic carbon, organic matter, total nitrogen, total phosphorus and total potassium values was 6.15, 0.28 dS m^-1, 19.93%, 34.37%, 0.30%, 0.20% and 1.14%, respectively for soilless media.

Keywords

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