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Dragon fruit has evolved into a highly valuable commercial fruit crop worldwide, and the demand for quality planting materials (QPMs) has grown dramatically. However, limited availability of QPMs hinders its expansion. Therefore, experiments were conducted with the objective of identifying the optimum concentration of rooting hormones and formulating of lightweight growing mixtures, as well as assessing their propagation and nutrient uptake efficiency (NUE) in dragon fruit. The formulated substrates had significant differences in physicochemical properties and nutrient contents, affecting the rooting and growth of cuttings. The formulated substrates (S4-soil + cocopeat + vermicompost, 1:1:1/v:v:v) significantly promoted early root initiation with higher rooting and survival of plantlets. A higher increase in nutrient accumulation in the rooted cuttings (roots by 111% for N, 158% for P, and 142% for K; shoots-15% for N, 142% for P, and 129% for K) also resulted in S4 as compared to the control (S1-soil). Similarly, S4 had higher nutrient uptake efficiency (23%), nutrient response (110%), and water use efficiency (106%) than S1. Based on the result of experiment-I, the best rooting substrate (S4) was used with different indole-3-butyric acid (IBA) concentrations to find out the rooting and growth behaviours of cladode cuttings. It was found that 25 mM IBA had significantly decreased the days to root initiation (16.86 ± 1.71 days) with higher root characteristics and plantlet survival over other treatments. Therefore, cladode cuttings treated with 25 mM IBA grown in rooting substrates (soil + cocopeat + vermicompost) can be the most appropriate nursery technique to enhance the rooting, growth attributes, and nutrient use efficiency in dragon fruit.
Rymbai et al. (Fri,) studied this question.
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