Effect of Magnesium and Foliar Spray of Gibberellic and Salicylic Acids on Vegetative Growth Characteristics of Peach (Prunus persica L.) Saplings CV. Miski

Abstract

This study was conducted in the lath house of the Department of Horticulture and Landscape Design/ College of Agriculture/ Tikrit University during the growing season of 2017 to investigate the effect of magnesium application and the foliar spraying of both gibberellic and salicylic acids on the vegetative growth characteristics of peach saplings CV. Miski, aged one year which were grafted on Apricot seedlings. Magnesium was added in three concentrations (0, 50 and 100 mg.litre-1) and was labelled as Mg0, Mg1 and Mg2 consecutively. The gibberellic acid was sprayed in three concentrations (0, 50 and 100 mg.liter-1) and labelled as GA0,GA1 and GA2 consecutively. Besides the salicylic acid was sprayed with the following concentrations (0, 100 and 200 mg.L-1) and labelled as SA0, SA1 and SA2 consecutively. All these processes were performed starting from April 10 three times, with a time interval of three weeks. The experiment was performed based on the split-plot system in Randomized Complete Block Design (RCBD) in which the various magnesium concentrations were added to the main plots and both the gibberellic and salicylic acids were applied to the subplots. The results showed that the addition of magnesium has positively increased the main stem diameter, single leaf area, total leaves area per plant and the relative chlorophyll concentrations in leaves. The height and the diameter of a sapling, length of the branches, leaf area and total leaves area of sapling were increased as a result of foliar spraying with gibberellic acid. The spraying of salicylic acid has a positive effect on the saplings’ characteristics (leaf area, total leaves area and relative chlorophyll concentration in leaves). The dual or triple interaction treatments between the three studied factors had the positive results in most characteristics were investigated.