Study of Different Fertilization Methods on Oil Palm (Elaeis guineensis) Vegetative Factors

Oil palm propagation techniques are juvenile pot plants derived from germinated seeds and tissue culture, because it doesn’t produce sucker. In the nursery stage, monitoring the conditions of irrigation and nutrition are important to ensure phenotypic quality. During the nursery stage, optimal fertilization in development of more vigorous and productive plants. This research was carried out to increase fertilizer use efficiency and its impact on vegetative growth of juvenile oil palm plants in greenhouse based Factorial experiment according completely randomized design with three replications at greenhouse of date palm and tropical fruit research institute in Ahvaz during 2011-2013. Treatments included five different fertilization methods (Without fertilization or control, soil application, fertigation, foliar spray and soil application add foliar spray on juvenile pot plants derived from germinated oil palm seeds) and eight genotypes. The results showed that different methods of fertilization were significantly different in vegetative growth characteristics. Also, different cultivars were significantly different in all vegetative traits except chlorophyll content. Interactions between treatments were significant in the growth characteristics of stem and number of leaves (P≤0.05). Fertigation with mean seedling height, stem height, stem diameter, leaf length and width, equivalent to 138.9, 26.0, 7.3, 126.5 and 40.6 cm, respectively and the average number of leaves and leaflets of 11.9 and 44.6 numbers per plant respectively and chlorophyll content of 55.3 was superior fertilization method comparing to other methods.