was carried out to determine the statistical significance of the treatment effects with the least significant difference procedure at a significance level of 0.05 (Gomez and Gomez, 1984; Mahdy, 2011).
Results and discussion
Effect of the treatments on the chlorophyll content in the maize leaves
The total chlorophyll content of the maize leaves was strongly depressed by using the irrigation saline water as shown in Table 2. The foliar application could effectively compensate such depression in the order GA3 > Si > SA affecting the leaves content of both chlorophyll a and b (Ananieva et al.,
2002).
NPK content in leaves
Table 3 presents the total NPK content of plants with different treatments. It can be said that the N content was unaffected by salinity. Additionally, it was suppressed by the application of GA3 while enhanced by SA and Si application. Phosphorous content was neither affected by salinity nor by GA3 and Si application. It was slightly enhanced by SA application. This is in agreement with previous studies (Nazar et al., 2011).