WEED MANAGEMENT PRACTICES ON WEED CONTROL EFFICIENCY AND YIELD OF BLACKGRAM

Afield experiment was conducted on sandy clay loamy soil during the rabiand summer season of 2011-2012 at Agricultural College and Research Institute, Madurai, Tamil Nadu to evaluate the effective weed management practices in blackgram. The experiment comprising of eleven weed management treatments were conducted in a randomized block design and replicated thrice. The treatments involving pre-emergence herbicide viz., pendimethalin and post-emergence herbicide viz., imazethapyr, quizalofop-ethyl and in combination with hand weeding once. In addition, hand weeding twice at 15 and 30 DAS were tested with unweeded check. The results revealed that higher seed (1431 kg/ha in rabi and 1493 kg/ha in summer) yield and higher weed control efficiency were recorded under application of pendimethalin (0.75 kg/ha) as pre emergence at 3 DAS followed by (fb) mixture of imazethapyr (50 g/ha) + quizalofop-ethyl (50 g/ha) as post emergence at 20 days after sowing (DAS) and which was comparable with pre emergence application of pendimethalin fb half the dose mixture of above mentioned post emergence herbicides. The control treatment, more weed growth observed throughout the crop growing period caused 62 and 58 per cent reduction in seed yield during both rabiand summer seasons respectively. Based on the results, it can be concluded that application pendimethalin followed by imazethapyr + quizalofop-ethyl enhanced the weed control efficiency and also an effective weed management practice with respect to yield and cost for the blackgram.