EFFECT OF BREAD YEAST APPLICATION AND SEAWEED EXTRACT ON CUCUMBER (Cucumis sativus L.) PLANT GROWTH, YIELD AND FRUIT QUALITY.

An experiment was carried out in the plastic house of Horticulture Department/college of Agriculture/ Duhok University on Cucumber plants during 2009 growing season to determine the effect of bread yeast and seaweed extracts Alga 600 and sea force 2 on growth, yield and its component on Cucumber C.V. shadi. The results showed that spraying bread yeast or seaweed extract resulted in positive significant difference in shoot characteristics and in all yield traits as compared to untreated treatment. The interaction between yeast and seaweed extract was significantly enhanced all detected traits. Since cucumber plant received 6 g.l bread yeast and sprayed with a mixture of 0.33ml.l Alga 600 +2.5 ml.l Sea force 2 were characterized by the highest values of all shoot and yield characteristics. INTRODUCTION Cucumber, Cucumis sativus L. has been commonly cultivated in Iraq during the summer and fall as well as in low tunnels and plastic and green houses and its fruit use as fresh or after processing (Matlob et al 1989). The yield per unit area in Iraq is still too low comparing with world production. Bread yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae is considered as a type of biofertilizer which is usually added to soil or as foliar application on vegetable crops (ElGhamry et al 1990) because its nutrition properties as well as its produce substances like growth regulators such as gibberellins and auxins (Sarhan and Sharif 1988), and its ability to produce a group of enzymes (Dinkha and Khazrge 1990). Yeast treatment suggested to participate beneficial role in improving growth of vegetable crops which reported by Fathy and Farid (1996), Hewedy et al. (1996) Mohammed et al. (1999) Fathy et al (2000), Omer (2003) and Sarhan (2008). The uses of plant extracts is began to be applied like seaweed extract which is rich in macro and micro elements, Important plant hormones like Auxins, Gibberellins and Cytokinin which induce cell division and increasing cell enlargement and lead to balance of physiological and biological processes and increasing photosynthesis processes and improving growth characters (Jensen (2004)). Kowalski et al (1999) describe the positive effects of seaweed extract on plant growth and increasing yield of potato plant significantly, and Thomas (2002) describe that using seaweed extract (sea Buck thorn ) causes increasing growth and fresh weight of vegetative and roots growth significantly of Rosemary plant while Jensen (2004) stated that seaweed extract contain micro elements ( Co, B, Mo, Zn, Cu) and macro elements, Auxins, Gibberellins and Cytokinin and when sprayed lead to increase nutrient absorption and root growth ability and increasing stem thickness . Mesopotamia j. of Agric (ISSN 1815-316X) Vol. (39) No(2) 2011 27 ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Received date 15-2-2010 accepted date 21/6/2010. MATERIALS AND METHODS The experiment was carried out at the vegetative research farm, College of Agriculture, University of Duhok under plastic house during the season of 2009 to study the effect of bread yeast and seaweed extract (Alga 600 and sea force 2) on plant growth, yield and fruit quality of cucumber. The seed of cucumber C.V. Shadi was sowing at 15 February 2009. The experiment included eight treatments as follows: Y0 E0 untreated plants (control) Y0 E1 Alga 600 at 0.33 g.l concentration. Y0 E2 sea force 2 at 2.5 ml l concentration. Y0 E3 mixture of two seaweed extracts 0.33g l +2.5 ml l (E1+E2) Y1 E0 yeast and without seaweed extracts 6g l. Y1 E1 yeast and seaweed extracts (Alga 600) at concentration 0.33g l. Y1 E2 with yeast and seaweed extract (sea force 2) at 2.5 ml l concentration. Y1 E3 yeast and mixture of both seaweed extracts 0.33g/L + 2.5 ml l. (E1+E2). Yeast spraying was applied three times within ten days intervals. Starting from 20 day after sowing .Seaweed extract was sprayed three times as well as, after flower initiation ten days –intervals. The seeds were sown on rows with width of 75 cm and the distance between plants was 40 cm. uniform cultivation practices were followed according commercial farmers. The previous treatments were arranged in three replicates using complete randomized block design (RCBD). Data were analyzed by using SAS program (Anonymous, 2001). Experimental measurements were as follows: Vegetative characteristics: which include Plant height (cm): measurement were made at the end of the growing season, Total chlorophyll content, take after 45 day from planting by Chlorophyll meter, model SPAD-502. And Yield characteristics: which include, Early fruits yield: of first six harvests from each treatment were weighted to calculate the early yield per M2 and per hectare. Total yield: all fruits harvested from each treatment along the harvesting period were weighted to calculate the total yield per M2 and per hectare Harvesting was recorded on march .20 and the final harvest was on may 2