Weed dynamics as affected by practices and straw mulches in chickpea

A two year field experiment entitled “Effect of weed control practices alone and in combination with crop mulch on weed dynamics, yield and economics of chickpea” was conducted at Live Stock Farm, Department of Agronomy, Jawaharlal Nehru Krishi Vishwa Vidyalaya, Jabalpur during Rabi 2018-2019 and 2019-2020. The 16 treatments comprising of four weed control practices viz. Pendimethalin (38.7% CS) 1 kg a.i. /ha as PPI, Hand Weeding at 30 DAS, Hand Hoeing at 30 DAS and Control (No weed control) as a main plot treatments and four crop mulches i.e. Wheat straw (5 t/ha), Paddy straw (5 t/ha), Soybean straw (5 t/ha) and Control (No mulch) were assigned in sub-plot treatments and these were laidout in a split plot design with three replications. It is evident from the data Cichorium intybus (31.95%), Medicago truncatula (21.82%) and Melilotus indica (20.52%) were rampant weeds in chickpea. Hand hoeing at 30 DAS caused marginal reduction in density and dry weight of weeds over weedy check. However, hand weeding done at 30 DAS in chickpea curbed the density and dry weight of weeds to the maximum extent followed by pendimethalin 1 kg /ha as PPI and attained the higher values of weed control efficiency (69.68 and 52.12% respectively) compared to hand hoeing (42.23%) and weedy check plots (0.00%). Similarly, application of paddy straw (5 t/ha) reduced the density and dry weight of weeds appreciably and attained higher weed control efficiency (61.34%) followed by wheat straw (53.04%) against soybean straw which reduced weed biomass to the tune 32.62 % only. The chickpea yield was minimum (0.87 t/ha) in control plots, which was increased markedly under different weed control practices and crop mulches. Hand weeding done at 30 DAS produced significantly higher seed yield (1.67 t/ha) being at par to pendimethalin 1kg /ha (1.49 t/ha) than one hand hoeing (1.27 t/ha) and control plots (0.87 t/ha). The seed yield was significantly higher (1.55 t/ha) under paddy straw mulch (5 t/ha) followed by wheat straw mulch (1.40 t/ha) in comparison to no straw mulch plots (1.10 t/ha) and soybean straw mulch (1.23 t/ha).