Comparison of compost or green manure with farmyard manure for fertilizing organic greenhouse tomato
Description
The 2nd group of experiments (GE2) included two successive tomato experiments. The first experiment (GE2E1) started on May 23rd 2017 and was terminated on January 19th 2018; the second experiment (GE2E2) started on February 8th and was terminated in on June 11th 2018. In the 1st experiment (GE2E1) the commercial tomato hybrid ‘Elpida F1’ grafted onto the commercial rootstock ‘Arazi F1’ was cultivated, while in the 2nd experiment (GE2E2) the commercial tomato hybrid ‘Ekstasis F1’ grafted onto the commercial rootstock ‘Maxifort F1’ was cultivated. The plant density was 1.07 plants m-2 in GE2E1 and 2.13 plants m-2 in GE2E2 but the plants in the GE2E1 were pruned into two stems and thus the stem density was identical in both experiments (2.13 plants m-2).
The GE2 was designed to assess the efficiency of compost, or green manure using legume crops inoculated with rhizobia, as sole sources of nitrogen in organic greenhouse crops of tomato in comparison with FYM. Therefore, in GE2, FYM (the same source and amount as in GE1) was applied only in treatment 1 (T1) which was considered the control treatment.