2.4.1. Soil physico-chemical properties, soil essential nutrients and soil enzyme study
Five soil sub-samples were collected from chickpea plant rhizosphere area of each plot of the experiment field and mixed together to form a composite soil and it considered as one sample from each replicated plot of field. After collecting the soil immediate put in the sterilised plastic bag in ice box. The pot soils were collected in same process only single pot soil collected as single replication. Soil physicochemical property like pH (Jackson, 1958), electrical conductance (EC) (Chopra and Kanwar, 1982), organic carbon (OC) (Walkley and Black, 1934); organic matter (OM) were measured. The soil essential nutrient like available N (Subbiah and Asija, 1956); available P (Olsen et al., 1954) and available K (Hanway and Heidel 1952), important soil enzyme activity like dehydrogenase (Casida et al. 1964); urease (Kandeler and Gerber 1988); alkaline phosphatase (Eiazi and Tabatabai 1977) and Beta-glucosidase (Eivazi and Tabatabai, 1988), were measured from the soil sample that were collected from the experimental field and pot during flowering time.