Physiological conditioning and coating of sweet pepper seeds

Abstract

Seed coating and osmotic conditioning are techniques which enable improvements in seed quality, nevertheless, they are still little utilized; there being a need for adequacy of those techniques for them to be able to be widely utilized by the farmers. Thus, that work was developed in the Seed Analysis Laboratory of the Agriculture Department of the Universidade Federal de Lavras with the purpose of evaluating the influence of different coating materials as well as of the pre-germinative treatment, and in physiological quality of sweet pepper seeds. So, seeds of the variety Hercules AG672, treated with 0.15% Captan were submitted or not to the physiological conditioning by utilizing solution of -1.1 MPa KNO3 and at 25ºC for 6 days, with aeration system. After drying, a part of the seeds was coated with sand + micro cellulose and the other with limestone + micro cellulose. The seeds coated were dried and packed, along with the non-coated in multifoliate paper envelopes and stored under room conditions. The evaluations were performed every four months for 20 months by utilizing the tests of germination, accelerated aging , of seedling emergence in soil + sand and of controlled decay. The coated seeds presented less vigor relative to those non-coated and the seeds coated with sand obtained  better physiological quality in relation to those limestone-coated. Seeds submitted to the conditioning decay faster than the non-conditioned seeds