Offshoots weight and disinfection on Medjool Date palm survival rate

ABSTRACT: Date palm offshoots culture is still the most common way for date palm propagation, so it’s very necessary to presenting methods for increasing offshoot survival rate. There are several factors that affecting offshoot vegetative growth such as, duration of separating to planting time, offshoot weight, ages, pests and diseases injury. This experiment, was conducted in a randomized complete block design in split plots method with three offshoot weight including, 5-8, 8-11, 11-15 kilogram in main plots and four disinfection levels including control, without disinfection, 1, 2 and 3 disinfection times, in sub plots with four replication, during 2011-12 years, in Date Palm and Tropical Fruit Research Institute of Iran. Results showed that increasing offshoot weight, significantly improved offshoot vegetative growth and survival rate, also pest’s damage was more in light weight offshoots than heavy ones. The increasing in disinfection levels decreased significantly pest’s damage. Interactions between offshoot weight and disinfection levels were showed that all of 5-8-kilogram weight offshoots died in non disinfection treatment, 8-11 and 11-15 kilogram weight offshoots damaged slight in one time disinfection treatment, and finally pest’s damage in 2 and 3 times disinfection treatments was minimum for all offshoot weights. In other words, disinfection is a necessary operation for offshoot planting, especially for offshoots light weight.