Abstract:
Tomato is popular hydroponic crop cultivated predominantly with Albert solution. However, the
recent trend in increased demand for organic agriculture warrants the need of alternative green liquid
fertilizers as opposed to inorganic solution. Therefore, this study intended to investigate the
effects of tomato photosynthetic, growth and yield performance supplemented with a simple
and organic liquid fertilizer (OLF) prepared from home garden wastes through natural anaerobic
fermentation using compost, goat manure, wild sunflower leaves, and banana peels supplemented
with brown sugar (25 g/l). Anaerobic fermentation was allowed for up to 30 days. The prepared OLF
was used to arrange five OLF treatments T1 (OLF, pH-5.5-6.5), T2 (OLF, pH-6.5-7.5), T3 (OLF, SWE,
pH-5.5-6.5), T4 (OLF, SWE, pH-6.5-7.5), T5 (OLF, pH-5.5-6.5, MOP) and in addition, T6 - control (1000
ppm Albert solution, pH-5.5-6.5) with Albert solution were maintained in a plant net house
facility. Tomato variety cv. Platina was used characterize the vegetative, floral, photosynthesis, and
yield traits. Our results indicated that the nutrient levels were significantly higher at 15 days after
fermentation, and highest nitrogen and phosphorus were obtained in the liquid solution. Tomato
trial revealed that T6 (control) had significantly (P<0.05) increased performance on leaf area (372
cm2
), plant height (166cm) photosynthetic rates (18.9) and chlorophyll content (58.0 SPAD) and
increased number of fruit set (13 fruits /plant) as opposed to other treatments. However, the T3
produced the highest performances among the OLF treatment. With those findings, T6 (Albert
solution, control) produced highest total fruit yield (701g/plant) followed by T3 (557g/plant),
suggesting that the treatments supplemented with Albert solution outperforms photosynthetic,
growth and yield characters in tomato. However, the T3 showed the second highest performance
among the treatments, Hence T3 can be proposed as an alternative organic liquid solution for
cultivation of hydroponic tomato.
