Salt stress mitigation by calcium nitrate in tomato plant

Salt stress is one of the most subversive abiotic stress which severely affects the agricultural productivity in various ways. The pot experiment was conducted at the Horticulture Farm of Sher-e-Bangla Agricultural University, Dhaka during the period from November 2017 to April 2018. BARI Tomato-5 was used as planting material. The two factors experiment was laid out in RCBD with four replications. Five levels of salinity induced by sodium (Na+) viz., 0, 2, 4, 6 and 8 dS m-1 and three levels of Ca2+ viz., 0, 5 and 10 mM were used as treatment variables. The results of this experiment showed that, the salt stress reduced the yield parameters and yield of tomato with the increase of salinity. The lowest data was recorded from 8 dS m-1 and highest value was observed at control. The present results also showed that, Ca2+ significantly increased the yield contributing characters as well as yield of tomato in both saline and non-saline conditions. However, for combined effect, highest number of fruits plant-1 (50.8) and the highest yield plant-1 (3.88 kg) was produced from 0 dS m-1 Na x 10 mM Ca2+; whereas the lowest from 8 dS m-1 x 0 mM Ca2+. This result suggests that, exogenous Ca2+ can effectively mitigate the deleterious effect of salt stress in tomato