ORIGINAL PAPER The response of properties of soil cropped with shell beans and treated with disinfectant and fertiliser during the plant growing season Pantelitsa Kapagianni & Nikos Monokrousos & George P. Stamou & Efimia Papatheodorou Received: 25 January 2012 / Revised: 21 May 2012 / Accepted: 23 May 2012 # Springer-Verlag 2012 Abstract Disinfectants and fertilisers exert strong impact on soil processes by affecting the structure and the activity of the soil microbial community. Most relevant studies examined these impacts independently, under laboratory conditions and without crop cover. In this study, we have monitored the response of soil chemical, microbial, and biochemical properties to disinfectant and fertiliser treat- ments in field plots cultivated with beans. The measured properties comprised microbial C and N, asparaginase, gul- taminase, urease, and acid phosphomonoesterase activities and contents of organic N, organic C, inorganic N, and inorganic P. We ran four different treatments using different combinations of chemical (metham sodium) and biological disinfectant (a mixture of neem cake and essential oils) and fertilisers (NPK 8-16-24 and cow manure) in plots cultivat- ed with shell beans, while the control soil was neither treated nor cropped with beans. The data were expressed as percentage (%RC) in relation to the control values. The disinfectant and fertiliser treatments had less impact on soil properties compared to bean crop growth (except for micro- bial C and N, and content of organic C). In comparison to the control, higher activities of urease and asparaginase and content of inorganic N were recorded in bean cropped plots at the stage of seedlings (June), while higher activities of acid phosphomonoesterase and glutaminase and content of organic N were recorded at the stage of plant flowering (August). In October, the values of all properties were higher in the control plots compared to the treated plots. The joint effect of disinfectants x fertilisers affected the response of content of organic C and N and extractable P and glutaminase activity. The %RC of the properties exhibited more negative values in plots treated with chem- ical disinfectant and chemical fertiliser than in the other treatments. We suggested that the response of soil properties to disinfectants and fertilisers were influenced by the growth of P. vulgaris. Keywords Azadirachta indica A. Juss . Amidohydrolases . Neem cake . Essential oils . Metham sodium . Manure . Acid phosphomonoesterase Introduction One of the most common practices applied in both conven- tional and organic agriculture is soil disinfection. Disinfec- tion treatments are used to increase crop yield, by suppressing soil-borne pathogens (US Environmental Protection Agency Office of Pesticide Programs 2008), nematodes (Giannakou et al. 2002), insects (Desaeger et al. 2004), and weeds (Stromberger et al. 2005) and to increase the ratio between beneficial and deleterious rhizo- sphere colonisers (Martin 2003). Disinfectants, by affecting the biomass and the composition of the soil microbial com- munities (Omirou et al. 2011), also affect the activity of soil enzymes (Stromberger et al. 2005) and the rates of important soil processes, such as C and N mineralisation (Ibekwe et al. 2001; Collins et al. 2006). Due to its rather unfavourable effects on soil biodiversity, chemical disinfection is gener- ally perceived as causing disturbance to the soil system (Fujino et al. 2008). Therefore, the replacement of chemical disinfectants with less harmful products has been increas- ingly considered over the last three decades. One such group P. Kapagianni : N. Monokrousos : G. P. Stamou : E. Papatheodorou (*) Department of Ecology, School of Biology, Aristotle University, Thessaloniki( U.P. Box 119, 54 124, Greece e-mail: papatheo@bio.auth.gr Biol Fertil Soils DOI 10.1007/s00374-012-0712-3