Growth characters and chemical constituents of Dracocephalum moldavica L. plants in relation to compost fertilizer and planting distance

Growth Characters and Yield of Dragonhead in Relation to Fe2o3 Nano-Scale Fertilizer and Sowing Density

“…Wahba and Ezz El-Din (2002) on Chrysanthemum coronarium and Hussein et al (2006) on dragonhead reported similar results, while opposite trends were found by Zayed et al (2003) on borage plant. Also, number of flowering branches (NFB) was increased with increasing the distance of plants and similar finding was reported by different authors such as Das et al (1992) on black cumin and Hussein et al (2006) on dragonhead.…”

“…Wahba and Ezz El-Din (2002) on Chrysanthemum coronarium and Hussein et al (2006) on dragonhead reported similar results, while opposite trends were found by Zayed et al (2003) on borage plant. Also, number of flowering branches (NFB) was increased with increasing the distance of plants and similar finding was reported by different authors such as Das et al (1992) on black cumin and Hussein et al (2006) on dragonhead. Moreover, morphological traits such as dry weight (DW), demonstrated that the widest distance did not result in highest dry weight of herb but some authors found the promotion effect of wider plant spacing on vegetative growth characters such as Belyaonka et al (1997) on chrysanthemum and Wahba and Ezz El-Din (2002) on Chrysanthemum coronarium plants.…”

“…These results may be attributed to the role of iron micro-nutrient, in stimulating metabolic processes, encouraging growth and increasing the synthesis and accumulation of more essential oil in plant tissues. Several investigators mentioned similar results on different plants such as El-Desuki et al (2001) on sweet fennel, Khalil et al (2002) on Mexican marigold, Khalil and ElSherbeny (2003) on mint, and Hussein et al (2006) on dragonhead, who observed that application of different macro and micro-nutrients significantly improved plant growth characters. This result may be due to effect of iron nanofertilizer on accelerating metabolism reactions as well as stimulating enzymes.…”

“…When calculating the yield performance in a unit area, the narrower spaces will contain high number of plants and consequently more yield will be obtained and the heavier plants obtained in the wider spaces in the same unit area may reach the yield obtained in the narrower distance (Hussein et al (2006). In the present investigation a positive relationship between increasing plant sowing density (D2 treatment) and essential oil yield was found; the same finding was reported by El-Sherbeny et al resulted in increasing chlorophyll a and b, and total anthocyanins, so photosynthetic pigments showed almost similar trend of some other growth traits.…”

“…If the planting density is greater, the environmental factors will not be enough for the plant growth and development, while, if it is less, environmental factors are not used more effectively, and leading to a decrease in the performance (Galambosi and Holm, 1991). Hussein et al (2006) indicated that wider plant distances of dragonhead increased the herbage biomass because individual plants in wider distances had more branches and herbage yield compared to the narrow distances. Sarvari et al (2013) reported the highest plant height, number of primary shoot, fresh weight and dry weight as well as the highest herbage yield (10.4 ton ha -1 ), essential oil content (0.46 %) and essential oil yield (44.9 kg ha -1 ) obtained from 40 cm planting distance.…”