Use of Indigenous Germination Bioassay to Test Maturity of Common Organic Fertilizers

Abstract

Compost quality has been described using different techniques. However, none of these techniques is efficient enough to provide a universal answer at all time and place to the question of when compost could be considered matured. In Nigeria, composition of compost varied according to materials and method used to prepare it as well as time interval between preparation and usage.To determine the quality of compost, seeds of nine cultivated crops divided into three seed size grades -large, medium and small were grown in four growing media namely Alesinloye organic fertilizer, Sunshine organic fertilizer, immature and matured Tithonia composts. The seeds were left to germinate and the seedlings allowed to grow for a period of twenty to twenty four days, data were collected on percentage germination and root length. From the data, germination index was computed for each of the crop seed in each of 18 the growth medium. Results show that groundnut and tomato are the least tolerant to poor compost quality among the tested seeds; they had the highest relative germination rate (88) and relative root length (28) respectively in matured Tithonia