Determination of the effect of boron applied at different doses to the soil and irrigaton water on growth and dry matter yield of corn plant under greenhouse conditions

In recent years, it has been reported in the literature that boron (B) improves the resistance of the plants to abiotic stress factors, particularly to drought. In this thesis study carried out under the greenhouse conditions in order to demonstrate the role of B in resistance to drought stress, the effect of five different B (0, 0.2, 1.0, 5.0 and 25.0 mg kg-1 B) and five different available water (AW) (AW 25%, AW 50%, AW 75% and AW 100%) on the dry matter yield of the plant, the shoot B concentration and content in the Kebeos corn variety was determined. According to the obtained results it has been determined that the dry matter yield of the plant increased as the amount of available water increased. However, with increasing B applications, the plant's dry matter yield has decreased. Under the applications where the available water is 10%, the dry matter yield decreases due to B applications compared to the control application were determined to be 5.6%, 3.8%, 19.5% and 10.7%, respectively. Similar decreases were found in 25%, 50% and 75% of available water applications. In contrast to these results, there were not decreases in the yield due to increasing B applications in the case where the available water was given 100%, whereas yield increases (16.5% -33.3%) were observed. The shoot B concentration of the corn plant has been seen increased significantly with increasing doses of B treatments. Irrespective of available water applications in the application where B was not given for all pots, while the shoot B concentration of the plant was 11.5 mg kg-1, whereas at the B doses of 0.2, 1.0, 5.0 and 25 mg kg-1, the shoot B concentrations of the plants were seen to increase at the levels of 12.4 and 13.6 mg kg-1, 29.0 and 178.7 mg kg-1, respectively. According to the results obtained from the study, it has been shown that increasing of the level of irrigation, particularly under the conditions where available B is low in soil increased the availability of B to the plants, lead to be able to prevent the losses of the yields due to deficiency of B.