General aspects regarding the organic cultivation of wax gourd in Romania

The climatic changes from Romania in the last decades, affected the productivity of local plants especially in south of the country where there are many droughty areas. Our objective was to identify new opportunities for protecting the environment in these areas by emphasizing the potential of cultivation of more resistant plants. With these aim in mind we conducted in 2013 two experiments of growing wax gourd, a plant specific to lowland tropical land. Our experiments (E3 and E4) came to complete the researches regarding this plant performed in 1960 (E1 and E2). We analyse these experiments in a comparative manner to present in this way the behaviour of plant in four types of cultivation: greenhouse; hotbed; open field - direct sowing; open field - planting seedlings. The results revealed a high yields potential (until 80 tons per hectare) and an improvement in soil composition which was enriched with nutritive substances, especially potassium and phosphorus. In this way, the wax gourd can be described like a very good plant for environment protection and also a plant with a high productivity. The results obtained permitted us to recommend the introduction of this plant in Romanian flora in areas with low alkaline reaction (pH over 7), high temperatures during summer (over 30 degrees C) and low level of precipitations (under 225 l/m(2) in June-September period). (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Peer-review under responsibility of the University of Agronomic Sciences and Veterinary Medicine Bucharest