The effect of salinity on the germination and early seedling growth of winged beans( Psophocarpus Tetragonolobu(L.) Dc).

• Main Author: Nurul Najwa Abd Rahim
• Format: Academic Exercise
• Language: English
• Published: 2016
• Subjects: S Agriculture (General)
• Online Access: https://eprints.ums.edu.my/id/eprint/18604/1/The%20effect%20of%20salinity%20on%20the%20germination%20and%20early%20seedling%20growth%20of%20winged%20beans.pdf; https://eprints.ums.edu.my/id/eprint/18604/

The winged bean has been considered as a traditional vegetable but has the potential to be commercialized in the Malaysian food market. Salinity Is one of the major problems that decreases the production of crops throughout the world. An experiment was conducted in Faculty of Sustainable Agriculture, Universiti Malaysia Sabah to evaluate the effect of salinity on the germination parameters and early seedling growth of winged beans under different salinity conditions. The treatments consist of six different levels of salinity which consists of 0%, 0.25%, 0.50%, 1.0%, 2.0% and 4.0% of NaCI. The NaCI powder is diluted in 1L of distilled water. The seeds were germinated in a germination box and uses coarse sand as the planting medium. Each germination box was irrigated daily with treatment solutions as required by the plants. Result was taken at the 10th day after sowing. The treatments were arranged in a Completely Randomized Design manner with three replicates each. The parameters observed in this study are germination percentage, seed vigor Index (SVI), length of plumule, length of radicle and number of leaves. This study showed that there were significant different between all the parameters of the winged bean to the different salinity levels. Winged bean seeds treated with 0% NaCl resulted in the highest means with values of 68% for germination percentage, 38.5 for SVI, 0.87 for number of leaves, 56.78mm for plumule length and 43.06mm for radide length (p<0.01). This study also exposed that as the salinity increases, the mean values for germination percentage and early seedling growth parameters decreased. Also, the winged beans were able to survive up until the T3 (0.50% NaCl solution) even though they resulted with the least germination percentage 7.67%. Winged bean seeds treated with T4 onwards did not germinate and did not show any growth. Therefore, it can be concluded that winged bean are able to survive up to 0.5% NaCI solution and salinity level beyond that is unsuitable for growing winged bean.