الفهرس | Only 14 pages are availabe for public view |
Abstract Water is one of the main issues disturb Egypt and the Arab world, where this crisis had natural causes such as climate change, with its drought and depletion in the level of stored water, and various statistics for the Arab world confirmed that water poverty will be increased with increasing population pressure on limited resources. In general, agriculture sector consumes large amount of water in irrigation process for economic crops, in addition medicinal and aromatic plants in particular needs adequate amount of water for irrigation, accordingly, there has been a tendency recently to do several researches to study water stress on different crops in order to achieve rationalization and conservation of water consumption and the use of multiple methods to work to increase the tolerance of cultivated plants to lack of water. Peppermint has been used in this research as it is an important economical medicinal plant, also its sensitivity to water stress, thus it will be easy to study the harmful effect of water depletion and easy to record different results. Among these techniques to face the stress applied exogenous foliar application ascorbic acid which is known as a natural antioxidant compound to increase tolerance of the plants towards difficult environmental conditions whether salinity, water stress or high temperature. Rooted mint cuttings planted during last week of March 2019 ,2020 in clay pots 30 cm in diameter, the medium used for planting was clay, sand and compost (2:1:1 v/v/v) with soil texture sandy clay loam. Three irrigation intervals were applied (4 days as normal stress,8 days as moderate stress and 12 days as severe stress), a constant quantity of water (1litre / pot) equivalent to 75% of field capacity (FC) had been added to all planted pots during irrigation, in addition five levels of ascorbic acid concentrations were applied (0,100,150,200 and 250 mgl-1 ) during the two growing seasons. The plants were sprayed four times during each season. First spray was after one month from planting date, the second spray one month later and finally the third and fourth spray were added after one month of the first and second cuts respectively. The experiment was designed as split-plot layout (irrigation levels as main plots and Ascorbic acid concentrations as sub plots) with four replicates, each replicate contained 15 treatments, and each treatment contained 3 plants as a plot. |