Growth and Yield of Okra (<em>Abelmoschus esculentus</em>) as Affected by Foliar Application of Fish Tonic

Continuous application of inorganic fertilizer has been creating a variety of issues to the ecosystem hence it has made a trend to more devotion on organic applications in crop cultivation. Fish tonic is one of the organic applications which is used for improving crop growth and development. Therefore, the present study was mainly concentrated to find out the effect of fish tonic on vegetable cultivation as a foliar application and find out the effect on growth and yield parameters on Abelmoschus esculentus. Experiment was designed as complete randomized design with six replicates. Each replicate consisted with eighteen plants of Okra; variety Vimukthi. There were seven treatments such as T1 – No any applications, only water (control), T2 – Albert’s Solution at 80g per 16 L of water, T3 to T7 - Fish tonic applied at 50, 100, 200, 400 and 600 ml of Fish tonic per 16 L of water respectively. The growth parameters such as plant height, number of leaves per plant, number of branches per plant, volume of the root fresh and dry root weight were taken weekly until 15 weeks. Meantime, time taken for flowering, number of flowers per plant and pods weight were taken as yield parameters. Data were analyzed using Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) from SAS 9.1.3 version. Subsequently, differences between treatment means were compared by Tukey’s pairwise comparison Test at the 5% level of probability. According to the results, significantly higher plant height, number of leaves and more branchers were recorded from T2 to T7 compared to control treatment. There was no significant effect of treatments on the volume of the root, fresh root weight, dry root weight and number of flowers. A significantly more days were taken to flowering by T2 to T7 treatments. Further, weight of the pods were significantly higher in T3, T4, T5 and T6. The results revealed that compared to the control treatment, Albert's solution and fish tonic treatments were shown significant improvement on growth and yield parameters. Therefore, the study suggests that good quality yield can be achieved with fish tonic to reduce the high cost and harmful conditions by replacing Albert’s solution like synthetic chemical liquid fertilizers.