Biofortificación del cultivo de apio (Apium graveolens) mediante la utilización de Yodo agrícola

Abstract

The cultivation of celery (Apium graveolens), has its origin in the Mediterranean as well as in the Himalayas and the Caucasus, in ancient times it was known in Egypt and was not consumed until the Middle Ages, today it is one of the most consumed vegetables worldwide. The countries that grow this vegetable the most are Spain and the United States. The former exports its production to several European countries such as France, the United Kingdom, Switzerland and Germany with an exorbitant amount of 52,000 tons of celery per year. Biofortification is considered as the process by which a certain micro nutrient (iodine) is applied to increase its concentration within a plant species, the most used method for this process is foliar application. The use of agricultural iodine in plant species allows the prevention and elimination of phytosanitary problems that occur during cultivation due to its diverse properties in the control of bacteria, fungi and viruses, as well as helping the development of the plant. In this sense, the effect of iodine at different doses and number of applications during its cycle was evaluated in this research. Certain parameters such as plant height, number of leaves per plant, plant color, chlorophyll, plant weight and presence of diseases were evaluated. For plant height, treatment D3A1 (4cc x l and 4 applications) gave the best result with a height of 35.92 cm. For the number of leaves per plant, treatments D3A1 and D1A2 obtained statistical similarity with 23.13 and 22.47 leaves, respectively. Regarding the color of the plant, all treatments showed a similarity in terms of the green color code of the Munsell table (5GY 4/8). Regarding the amount of chlorophyll, the treatment that presented the highest amount was treatment D3A2 with 1.63ug/g. For the weight per plant, the treatment that showed a significant difference was treatment D3A1 with a weight of 164.07 gr. As for the presence of diseases, all treatments presented foliar diseases caused by (Septoria apiicola).