Biostimulant for the production of lettuce lactuca satila

Abstract

According to the Plan Horticola Nacional (2010), the lettuce has filed a worldwide expansion in relation to its own area, mainly because of its socioeconomic importante. Given the previous description, the need of a quantitative research is presented in order to evaluate a biostimulant of Urtica dioica L. to stimulate the production of this leaf vegetable. Biostimulants are substances of plant origin that are intended to activate different physiological processes, such as photosynthesis and increased production of hormones that act on different elongation of plant’s cells (Montano et ál., 2008). For the present research, the nettle’s biostimulant extraction was performed by scanning alcohol distillation. This with the purpose of obtaining the active ingredients of this Urticaceae. Simultaneously, a lettuce productive system was implemented with two treatments: To = Absolute witness and T1 = Biostimulant, along with three repetitions in a block design. The variables evaluated were: harvesting fresh weight, dry weight and dry matter. With the dumped data it were calculated: mean, mode, median and standard deviation, also an analysis was performed by quartiles and interquartile range in order to observe the normality of the data. As a result, an upper average of 14 % was obtained in dry and cool weight using the biostimulant, but no significant statistically difference occurred compared with the dry matter`s percentage.