the experiment tittle: investigating the role of zinc application on vegetative and generative response among green maize hybrids
The best course would be to irrigate experimental pots according available water content of the soil , keeping in mind the daily evaporation rate to ward off any potential possibility of pot getting over-irrigated, thereby, facilitating leaching of added nutrients....
Dear Comfort Dlamini,
(1) I assume that you are using pots with drain-tubes kept open at bottom-side of the pots, and watering at required intervals to maintain field capacity moisture in the potted soil. I understand every time you add water to the experimental pots, some amount of excess water together with water-soluble nutrients from each pot leaches out through the drain tubes.
(2) I suggest you to arrange your experimental pots on elevated platform and place the drain-tube of each pot in a narrow-mouth, clean glass bottle (kept on the floor) to collect leachate from each watering. Leachate collected in each bottle may be returned to the pot during next round of watering.
By the above arrangement, you may avoid nutrient leaching from the potted soils.
The experimental setup I have described above to avoid leaching of nutrients from potted soils is used by the Soil Chemistry Researchers of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), Los Banos, Philippines. I myself worked at IRRI for five years (from 1984 to 1987, and from 1992 to 1994), and followed the method for my research work.
Hope you find the information useful.
Dear Comfort Dlamini
You can use one non-planted pot for each of the replicates. Add water to the pots to achieve 100% field capacity (FC), and weigh them. During the experiment, reweigh these pots and make up the losses with water in all pots. In this way you almost avoid water and nutrient leaching from the pots.
Best wishes
Kazem Ghassemi-Golezani
Endorsing some excellent points by Dr Hani, it is equally important to look at , whether or not we synchronise the time of fertiization with crop nutrient demand , the major driving force to facilitate leaching of unused fertilizers ,unnecessarily subjected to different immobilization processes.
Dear Comfort Dlamini,
Your problem is an interesting one and many good answers have already been given. An alternative approach could be to use fertigation technique if possible and ensure that the supply of irrigation water is delivered through drip irrigation method. But if you want to mimic field situations where rainwater may leach-out some of the nutrients supplied to the crop then you may continue using watering can containing water + fertilizer or nutrients that you are managing. As explained above you may collect the leachate and recycle it or you could wait to see the crop response symptoms or yield at the end of the study period. This is possible because you have control pots where nutrients are not being supplied. Remember, nature is not that perfect and cannot completely be controlled in the plant growing environment. Sorry, I have not understood completely your study objectives, so the answers given may or may not be very useful to you.
Good points by Dr Anil Kumar and Tarimo . Fertigation still offers better control on amount of water and nutrients to be injected into the pot , simply tailoring both the requirements as per crop , if leaching is to be kept at complete bay , and provided your experimental objectives facilitate such alteration in experimental methodology.
Thanks Dr Malhotra for appreciating .Infact , our major constraint in executing the fertigation as a mega-success is the lack of information about the nutrient and irrigation partitioning across critical growth stages of different crops to be grown...a definite way forward approach to improve both water-and nutrient -use -efficiency..
https://www.ngia.com.au/Attachment?Action=Download&Attachment_id=1409
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