Combined Environment, Medium and Priming Treatments Significantly Accelerate Sweet Pepper Seed Germination

Abstract

Sweet pepper (Capsicum annum L.) is a fruit-vegetable of immense importance in terms of consumption in the world. Its richness in vitamins and minerals has resulted in increased utilization in dishes across the globe. However, there is a danger of not meeting its growing demand since production has been dwindling in some countries, partly due to challenges encountered during seed germination stage, yet the success of this early growth stage contributes to half of the overall crop production potential. Many factors including environmental conditions, growth substrate, and seed preconditioning contribute to the success of seed germination. Their mode of action is mostly integrated and hence consideration needs to be paid to all of them beginning at the early seed germination stage. This study, therefore, investigated the combined effects of environment, medium, and priming on sweet pepper seed germination, with a view to contributing to overcoming seed germination failure. It was done in a Completely Randomized Design with three replications in two trials. The factors were evaluated as 3 environments x 4 media x 3 priming techniques. Data values were recorded on environmental conditions, media characteristics, seed germination rate and percentage. The data values were subjected to analysis of variance using SAS version 9.4. Significant means were separated using the LSD test at α=0.05. Results showed that prevailing environmental conditions and media characteristics varied across the treatments. More importantly, the effect of single factors of growing environment, medium type and priming proficiency, as well as their combinations on germination rate and percentage varied significantly across time and trials (P=0.0001). The hygromix-halo-priming-lathhouse (HP1L) treatment gave the best germination percentage of 100% by 28 days after sowing (DAS), which indicated that the three factors interact while influencing sweet pepper seed germination. The present study, therefore, recommends sowing sweet pepper seeds in hygromix (H) after halo-priming (P1) followed growing under a lathhouse (L) environment to accelerate and maximise germination rate and percentage.