Alleviating of Water Deficit in Eggplant by Two Different Mulches

Eggplant (Solanum melongena L.) belongs to the Solanaceae family. The family contains about 3000 species that are adapted to different geographic conditions (Rodan et al., 2020). The plant is one of the most important vegetables after potatoes and tomatoes (Chapman, 2019). The production of eggplant in the world is 54 MT, which about 90% of produced in Asian countries such as China, India, and Iran (Wei et al., 2020). The Eggplant fruits are rich in different phytochemical components such as aspartic acid, tropane, flavonoids, lanosterol, glycoalkaloids, histidine, oxalic acid, solasodine, ascorbic acid, and tryptophan (Naeem and Ugur, 2019). These components make it useful for various pharmaceutical uses including anti-inflammatory, anti-asthmatic, and anti-platelet hypo-lipidemic (Naeem and Ugur, 2019). It provides a valuable amount of mineral compositions to the human body such as K, Na, C, P, Mg, Fe, Zn, Mn, and Cu (Quamruzzaman et al., 2020). Eggplant shows highly different diversity in growth habits and resistance to abiotic stresses. Although the plant is drought-tolerant, many characters such as yield and yield components, suffer from severe E (Solanum melongena L.) is one of the drought-tolerant vegetable crops, however, recently climate change has had a devastating impact on crop cultivation in many parts of Iran. The present research aimed to investigate the application of date straw mulches (DSM) and plastic mulches (PM) on yield and morphological and physiological characters of the plant under different crop water requirements. A split-split plot experiment using an RCB design with three replications in Rodan, Hormozgan, Iran at 2017. The three levels of crop water requirement (CWR), i.e. 40, 70, and 100%, the two levels of DSM (i.e. control and DSM), and the three levels of PM (i.e. 0, 100, and 120 cm in soil depths), were allocated in the main, sub and sub-sub plots, respectively. The results of the analysis of variance revealed that the tripleinteraction effects of the DSM, PM, and CWR were statically significant for all traits (P < 0.05 or P < 0.01). However, none of the simple and interactions effects were not statically significant for leaf length and width. The results revealed that 40% of CWR reduced the yield by 49% compared with 100% CWR. Also, the application of the DSM and PM alleviated the deleterious effects of water deficit. Finally, the application of the mulches is recommended for eggplant in areas affected by water shortages.