Enhancing Dragon Fruit Growth: The Efficacy of Nano Urea as an Alternative to Conventional Urea in Subtropical Conditions

Abstract

Among the recent technologies, nano fertilizers are an emerging innovation, which has the potential to offer sustainable solutions to enhance the efficient use of nutrients and growth of plants. Nano urea is one of them, increasing nitrogen availability to crops by more than 80%, leading to greater use of fertilizer efficiency and crop output. The present investigation was carried out to depict the best treatment combination of urea, and nano urea for vegetative growth of dragon fruit. There was a significant increase in vegetative growth by nano urea regarding various growth characteristics. Results suggested that nano urea was beneficial and resulted very close to the recommended dose of fertilizers (RDF). Among the treatments under study, the foliar application of Urea @ 2% combined with Nano urea @ 6ml/L may be recommended for dragon fruit growth, since it produced maximum vegetative growth of dragon fruit in terms of plant length, number of primary branches, number of segments of main stem, number of areoles, stem thickness, stem circumference, number of spines, distance between two areoles, arch height and chlorophyll content at subtropical Lucknow condition.