Abstract

Author:
Shaymaa A.A. Badr, Sarah N. Abd EL-Khalek, Assem A. A. Mohamed

Doi: 10.26480/sfna.01.2024.19.34

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License CC BY 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited

Water deficit is a major stress condition at present and is one of the most serious environmental problems influencing crop productivity. Lavender (Lavandula officinalis L) has high economic and medicinal value. The trial was conducted during two studied seasons of 19/20 and 20/21 at CLAC farm, Giza, Egypt. This study was carried out to investigate the effect of irrigation rates, zeolite and lithovit levels to reduce and rationalize water to improve the yield of fresh herb and oil production and its content of active substances. The experiment design was split plots with three replicates, the main plots were irrigated rates 50, 80 and 100% of water requirements while the sub plots were zeolite at 210 kg/fed, spraying with lithovit at 2 g/l and interaction zeolite with lithovit, in addition to the control. The results state that the highest vegetative growth, i.e., number of leaves, plant height, and total fresh weight were obtained by irrigation level 80% of IR, The irrigation level 80% of IR significantly increased yield during the two successive seasons. Concerning treatments, the highest vegetative growth was obtained by adding zeolite with lithovit. The interaction effect between irrigation levels and other treatments shows that the 80% irrigation level combined with zeolite + lithovit gave the highest vegetative growth and oil yield. Water use efficiency (WUE) had the same trend; applying 80% of IR gave the highest WUE values. Using of zeolite with lithovit led to increasing WUE compared to the other treatments during the two studied seasons.