An Equivalency Investigation of Plant’s Essential Nutrient Content in Spent Mushroom Substrate

Abstract

The study compared the essential plant nutrients such as pH, Electrical conductivity, limit of detection (LOD), organic matter, nitrogen, potassium, phosphorous, magnesium, sodium, cation exchange capacity (CEC), micronutrients, and heavy metals between the fresh substrate and the substrates that had been in storage for three months. The Indian Soil Science Society, the Nagpur Amendment, and the 1985 amendment to the Fertilizer Control Order (FCO) were used to define the subsequent steps. The objective of this comparison here is for the search of available nutrients such as available micronutrients, macro nutrients that lead to the efficient growth of any plants along with the heavy metals, so that the traces can be removed before using it further. The fresh mushroom substrate consists of varying quantity of salts and unstable organic material which needs to be stable, and this can be achieved through the presservation of this substrate for two year before it could be used for any other purpose that further allows the substrate to leaching of organic solutes and decomposition of organic substance. The increasing trend can be seen for the fresh substrates phosphorous from 1.35 to 1.5%, magnesium from 0.62 to 1.18%, calcium from 2.86 to 3.14% for 3 months substrate whereas the potassium reduction was seen from 1.56 to 0.4% among macro nutrients. The micronutrients such as iron, zinc, copper showing the increasing trend from 0.48 to 0.64%, 74.4 to 123 ppm, 59 to 76.3 ppm respectively.

Keywords: essential plant nutrients, fresh substrate, available micronutrients, macro nutrients, heavy metals