Comparative nursery fertilizer trial

Abstract

Good fertilizer management in the main nursery is linked to the achievement of enhanced growth and development among oil palm seedlings. Polyfeed, a multi-nutrient soil additive has been introduced as a fertilizer for use in the oil palm nursery although a fertilizer  recommenda-tion exists. Kieserite is added to polyfeed to compensate for the low Mg content. A study to evalu-ate the effect of these two fertilizer formulations; polyfeed and polyfeed + kieserite against the standard OPRI treatment for oil palm seedlings at the main nursery was carried out. The experi-ment was conducted at Okyinso near Kade from May 2005 to March 2006, in a randomized com-plete block design with four treatments in three replications. Plant growth parameters such as plant height, butt circumference, leaf area and leaf area index were measured monthly. The re-sults of the vegetative measurement indicate that all the fertilizer treatments enhanced the growth of the seedlings. However the standard practice of OPRI gave the highest growth. Poly-feed + kieserite recorded better performance than polyfeed treated seedlings although it was an expensive treatment. The use of the standard practice treatment of OPRI was observed to be agronomically and economically the best treatment.