The effects of organic and inorganic fertilizer applications on morphological characteristics and tuber yield and quality in salep plant

The effects of different organic and inorganic fertilizer applications were investigated based on the assumption that organic matter supplementation under field conditions affects the morphological characteristics, tuber yield and quality of the salep plant, which is fed with organic matter in its natural growing environments.The experiment was established as a randomized blocks experimental design with 5 different fertilizers (control, mineral fertilizer, animal manure, compost and compost + mycorrhiza) and 3 replications long term experiments in the Research and Application area of Çukurova University Faculty of Agriculture, Department of Soil Science and Plant Nutrition in the 2020-2021 and 2021-2022 winter growing seasons. As a result of the research, significant differences were found between the fertilizers used in the experiment in terms of the properties examined. According to the average results obtained, the highest plant height (24.22 cm), number of leaves (6.59 per plant), number of flowers (7.40 per plant), leaf length (6.57 cm), leaf width (2.62 cm), number of juvenile tuber (1.58 per plant)were obtained from animal manure, the highest tuber weight per plant (8.22 g.plant-1) and tuber yield (123.8 kg.da-1) were obtained from compost application, and the highest glucomannan ratio (20.20%) was obtained from the mineral fertilizer. It has been concluded that in case of cultivation of salep plants in agricultural areas with low organic matter in our country, the amount of organic matter can be increased by using organic fertilizer applications, especially animal manure and compost applications, and in parallel, the morphological characteristics of salep and tuber yield will increase. In this study, it has been seen that salep has the potential to grow commercially and economically in Çukurova conditions with organic fertilizer applications in field conditions.