Hydroponics requires high-quality water to prepare a balanced nutrient solution to maximize plant yield potential. The increasing difficulty of finding high-quality water has led to an urgent need to find a way to sustainably use salt water, thereby limiting its negative impact on crop yield and quality.
Exogenous supplementation of plant growth regulators, such as gibberellin (GA3), can effectively improve plant growth and vitality, thereby helping plants better respond to salt stress. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the salinity (0, 10 and 20 mM NaCl) added to the mineralized nutrient solution (MNS).
Even under the moderate salt stress (10 mM NaCl) of lettuce and rocket plants, the reduction of their biomass, leaf number and leaf area determines their growth and yield significantly. Supplementing exogenous GA3 by MNS can basically offset salt stress by enhancing various morphological and physiological characteristics (such as biomass accumulation, leaf expansion, stomatal conductance, and water and nitrogen use efficiency). The effects of salt stress and GA3 treatment vary from species to species, thus suggesting that this interaction can increase salt tolerance by activating different adaptive systems.