Tamarind monograph.pdf - Crops for the Future

4.3 Soil Requirements
The tamarind tree can grow in a wide range of soils (Chaturvedi, 1985;
Sozolnoki, 1985) and has been suggested by Sozolnoki (1985) and Galang
(1955) to have no specific soil requirement. With little or no cultivation it
can flourish in poor soils and on rocky terrain. In India, it tolerates sodic and
saline soils where it grows in ravines and on degraded land (Anon, 1991).
Older plants are more resistant to salinity than seedlings and have been
found growing close to the sea (NAS, 1979; Pongskul et al., 1988; Anon,
1991). In fact, in northeast Thailand, tamarind has been reported to establish
naturally in areas with recently salinised soils (Nemoto et al.,1987). Dwivedi
et al. (1996) concluded during pot experiments that tamarind could grow in
soil containing up to 45% exchangeable sodium. El-Siddig et al., (2004 a,
2004 b) investigated germination and seedling establishment in saline media
and found a slight delay in emergence but no effect on seedling growth with
up to 30 mM NaC1. Any detrimental effects with higher salt levels were
mainly due to accumulated ions. Gebauer et al., (2001) suggested that
tamarind seedlings can tolerate salinity up to 80 mM NaCl as a result of their
ability to avoid excess ion accumulation through increased leaf volumes
associated with succulence.
However, tamarind, thrives best in loamy, deep, well drained alluvial soil,
which favours the development of a long tap root (Galang, 1955). Silt-clay
and clay soils were not condusive to plantations of tamarind in Mali (Kelly
and Cuny, 2000) but red sandy loam soils in Andhra Pradesh, India were
(Rao et al., 2000).
The tree does not tolerate water-logging (Relwani, 1993; Vogt 1995). In
Africa, the tree is reported to grow near ant-hills or termite mounds, which
indicates its preference for well aerated soils (Dalziel, 1937; Eggeling and
Dale, 1951; Irvine, 1961; Allen and Allen, 1981). The optimum pH for
tamarind is 5.5-6.8, which is slightly acidic (FAO, 1988), though it also
grows well in alkaline soils (Singh et al., 1997, quoted from Rao et al.,
1999). It has been suggested (Jansen, 1981) that its association with ant-hills
and termite mounds may also be due to a preference for a slight lime content
in the soil.
4.4 Tamarind as a component of vegetation
In Africa tamarind is typically a scattered tree of the savannah but it is
intimately related to people and habitations which provide a degree of
protection because of the uses made of the tree. Ethnobotanical and other
surveys confirm this in Northern Cameroon (Tchiegang – Megueni et al.,
2001), North-east Nigeria (Lockett et al., 2000), Benin (Codjia et al., 2003),
Burkino Faso (Kristersen and Lykke, 2003), Sudan (El – Siddig et al., 1999),
Southern Malawi (Maliro and Kwapata, 2002), Kenya (Muok et al., 2000)
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