Agricultural and Biological Research

Standardization of pit size and organic filling mixture for tissue cultured cultivar Barhee of date palm in hot arid region of western Rajasthan

B.D. Sharma, R.K. Meena*, R. Bhargava and Sheetal Rawat

The study aims to provide comprehensive guidelines for optimizing pit size and the composition of filling mixtures, thereby fostering the growth, root development, and overall health of tissue-cultured Barhee date palm cultivars. The experiment was undertaken in 2019-2021 at the ICAR-Central Institute for Arid Horticulture research farm located in Bikaner, Rajasthan, India. Fully hardened tissue-cultured saplings of the Barhee cultivar of date palm were planted with a spacing of 5 × 5 m in the month of July. Different planting pit sizes (1.00 m × 1.00 m × 1.00 m, 0.75 m × 0.75 m × 0.75 m, and 0.50 m × 0.50 m × 0.50 m) and filling mixtures of field soil, clay, and FYM (1.0: 1.0:1.0, 2.0:0.5:0.5, 0.5:2.0:0.5, and 0.5:0.5:2.0) were used as treatment combinations for evaluating the tree growth potential of plants. The experiments were laid out in a factorial randomized block design with three replications. The obtained results indicated that tissue-cultured plants of the Barhee cultivar grown under a pit size of 1 m³ with a filling mixture of 0.5 parts field soil, 0.5 parts clay, and 2.0 parts FYM performed better. Thus, the research confirms that improvement of the pit size and filling mixtures can have positive results on date palm establishment.