Tomato (Solanum lycopersicum L.) is one of the most important vegetable
plants in the world.Root-knot nematodes (Meloidogyne incognita) causing problems
in all growing tomato areas in Egypt. The use of such mineral nutrients is the most
environmentally successful method for limiting root-knot nematode damage. In this
study seven plant mineral nutrients i.e. calcium sulphate, zinc sulphate, magnesium
sulphate, iron sulphate, potassium sulphate N.P.K(20:20:20) and urea (5g/pot each)
separately were evaluated comparing with oxamyl on root-knot nematode (1000
second stage juveniles/ pot each) infecting tomato plant cv. Castle Rock under
greenhouse conditions (19±3ºC). Calcium sulphate showed the maximum values in
improving total plant fresh weight (65.0%), plant length (80.2%), shoot dry weight
(97.2%) and number of leaves per plant (24.2%), with the highest reduction
percentage in nematode population density that averaged 92.3%, followed by that
of urea application (85.5%), respectively. Rates of nematode build-up under the
stress of seven mineral nutrients and oxamyl were adversely affected. Such rates
ranged between 0.1 to 1.8 vs 4.2 for nematode alone. Namely, calcium sulphate
treatment had reasonable lower value of reproduction, (0.3) while, that of zinc
sulphate had the highest one (1.8), whereas oxamyl recorded a lowest rate ( 0.1),
respectively. Oxamyl as a systemic nematicide ranked second to calcium sulphate
in suppressing nematode population density (88.7%), and ranked first in diminishing
galls and eggmasses numbers with values of 88.2 and 100.0%, respectively.