Department of Horticulture and Plant Sciences, College of Agriculture and Veterinary Medicine, Jimma University, P.O. Box 307, Jimma, Ethiopia
Tolasa, M., Department of Horticulture and Plant Sciences, College of Agriculture and Veterinary Medicine, Jimma University, P.O. Box 307, Jimma, Ethiopia; Eshetu, B., Department of Horticulture and Plant Sciences, College of Agriculture and Veterinary Medicine, Jimma University, P.O. Box 307, Jimma, Ethiopia; Tulu, S., Department of Horticulture and Plant Sciences, College of Agriculture and Veterinary Medicine, Jimma University, P.O. Box 307, Jimma, Ethiopia
Hot pepper (Capsicum annum L.) is one of the commercially cultivated crops in most part of the world. It can be consumed both in the green states as well as matured. It is important crop in Ethiopia and high value cash crop, the production of which is generally confined to areas were water is often limiting. However, the yield of the crop in the dry season is limited attributing to the soil moisture stress in spite of the maximum sun light intensities. Therefore, the present experiment was conducted in 2014 cropping season at JUCAVM research site under irrigation to determine the effect of different types of mulches on the germination and growth performance of local hot pepper. The experiment had four treatments: Dry banana leaves, dry Vetivar-grass, plastic and bare plot laid out using Randomized Complete Block Design (RCBD) each replicated three times. Data was collected on seedling emergency and growth performance of hot pepper. The results indicated that using different mulches did not show any significant difference on germination and growth performance of hot pepper. This result gives us two conclusion lines: the first line is telling us that using any type of mulching material do not have unique implication on the growth performance of hot pepper. The other one is telling us that it might be because of uncontrolled environmental factors like heavy rain, snow in our experimental site. Likewise, the time for data collection also was early. However, the plastic mulches showed higher mean value in plant height, seedling emergency and number of plant. From this study, it is clear that even though the different mulching materials have no statistically significant differences on the growth performance of hot pepper still the plastic mulch showed better performance on seedling emergency, plant height and number of branch per plant under JUCAVM research site condition. © 2014 Academic Journals Inc.