The Effect of Storage Environments and Duration on Seed Germination of Amaranth (Amaranthus cruentus)

Amaranth (Amaranthus cruentus L.) is a very important leafy vegetable especially in Nigeria however, availability of quality seeds for sustainable production to meet the high demand has become a big challenge. This study was carried out to investigate the influence of storage environments and duration on the germination of amaranth seeds. Seeds of two accessions of amaranth (NGB 01259 and NGB 01276) produced during the late growing season of 2013 were used for the study. The laboratory experiment was conducted at Seed Testing Laboratory of The National Centre for Genetic Resources and Biotechnology (NACGRAB), Ibadan, Nigeria between 2014 and 2015. Ten grams of each accession were partitioned to three equal parts. Samples from each accession were kept separately in three different storage environments using aluminum cans as packaging materials. The seed samples were drawn at regular intervals of 4, 8, 12 and16 months in storage and evaluated for germination. Results of analysis of variance (ANOVA) on germination percentage revealed that the effect of storage environment and duration were highly significant (P = .01) on seed germination of A. cruentus. Also, the combined effect of storage environment and duration differed with seed germination of A. cruentus indicating that germination of amaranth seeds observed at each storage period varied with storage environment. However, germination percentage observed under short and medium term storage conditions at the end of sixteen months in storage were not significantly different in spite of different storage conditions with respective values of 78.5 and 77.5%. In conclusion, amaranth seed can be stored safely for up to sixteen months with over 70% viability at a temperature range of 15.1 to 20.3ºC and relative humidity of 26.9 to 50.7% or -8.2ºC to 3.1ºC and relative humidity of 42.7 to 72.1% with at least twelve hours electricity supply to the storage environments.