Journal of Environmental Biology

Efficacy of Vermicompost against fertilizers on Cicer and Pisum

and on population diversity of N₂ fixing bacteria

 

Jayanta Sinha*¹, Chanchal Kumar Biswas², Arup Ghosh³ and Amit Saha^2,4

 

¹Department of Zoology, ²Department of Botany, ³Department of Environment and Water Management,

⁴Department of Microbiology, B.B. College, Asansol, West Bengal, India

(Received: January 19, 2009; Revised received: September 05, 2009; Accepted: September 23, 2009)

 

Abstract: Vermicompost is a very important biofertilizer produced through the artificial cultivation of worms i.e. Vermiculture. Vermicompost is enriched with all beneficial soil bacteria and also contain many of the essential plant nutrients like N, P, K and micronutrients. It increases soil aeration, texture and jilt. In this work, study is being carried out to find out the effect of different fertilizers such as DAP, FYM and Vermicompost on various morphological parameters and on the in vitro growth of bacterial colonies and its diversity in relation to two important leguminous plants such as Pisum sp. and Cicer sp.? Results showed that plant grown in Vermicompost pretreated soil exhibited maximum increase in all morphological parameters such as? root length, shoot length, number of root branches, number of stem branches, number of leaves, number of flowers, number of pods and number of root nodules in four months sampling in comparison to untreated, FYM treated and DAP treated soils. Further in Vermicompost pretreated soil, number of N₂ fixing bacterial colony was maximum and showed highest diversity indices (1.6 and 0.99 and 2.0 and 0.99 for Cicer sp. and Pisum sp. respectively) than FYM, DAP and untreated control. Thus not only does the Vermicompost stimulate plant growth but also it increases the N₂ fixing bacterial population in soil and also its diversity.

Key words: Vermicompost, Pisum sp., Cicer sp., Morphological parameters, Bacterial diversity

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