Growth and Development of Passion Fruit Seedlings under Irrigation with Salt Water and Biofertilizer

The yellow passion fruit is a plant climbing botanically that has a good geographical distribution in Brazil, with more than 150 species in the country. The presence of salts in soil and irrigation water is one of the main obstacles in agriculture in the world, caused by low rainfall and high evapotranspirative rates causing the salts to accumulate in the soil. However, alternatives have been sought to try to mitigate such limitations of seedling production, such as the use of biofertilizers in the soil. In this way, the objective was to evaluate the growth and development of yellow passion fruit seedlings under the effects of irrigation water salinity and the use of bovine biofertilizer on the substrate. An experiment was carried out in a greenhouse in the Center for Agrarian Sciences and Biodiversity, from october/2017 tomarch/2018, in county of Crato-Ceara, Brazil. The substrate used was the first 20 cm material of a yellow Red Argisol. The experimental design was completely randomized design (C.R.D) in a factorial scheme 5x2, referring to the electrical conductivity values ​​of the irrigation water: 0.5; 1.0; 2.0; 3.0 and 4.0 dS m-1, in the soil without and with common biofertilizer, with three replicates. The biofertilizer, after being diluted in non-saline water (0.5 dS m-1) in the ratio of 1:3, was applied only once to 10% of the substrate volume two days before sowing. The increase in the salinity of irrigation water negatively affected the initial behavior of the passion fruit seedlings in terms of growth and development, especially in the treatments that did not receive the organic feed.