Author(s):

Rojalin Pradhan, Debi Archana Nayak, K Mallikarjuna Rao and P Mohapatra

Abstract: Cucerbitaceae is the largest family in vegetable crops. Cucurbits comprise 117 genera and 825 species. Out of this 30 species of nine genera are used as cultivated plants. Most of the cucurbits viz., cucumber, bottle gourd, ridge gourd, bitter gourd, snake gourd, water melon and muskmelons are monoecious and annul in habit. However plants like pointed gourd, spine gourd, ivy gourd and chow-chow are dioecious and perennials. It is of high market demand with a special delicacy for the people of India and it fetches premium price in the market. Though are potential vegetable crops, there is not much standardized scientific cultivation technology available for improving the yield. Agro techniques like nutrition, spacing, trailing and staking play an important role in commercial production. Spacing is an important factor which will influence the plant population and affect the nutrient uptake in plants by creating competition between plants for nutrients, water and availability of light to the plants for synthesizing the food. By manipulation of inter and intra row spacing, trailing and staking several workers reported higher yields to overcome the bottleneck of production. Canopy manipulation through pruning and training together with appropriate spatial arrangements has been identified as key management practices for getting maximum marketable yields from greenhouse crops especially cucurbits. Trailing and staking is done to increase yield, better exposure of plant to sunlight and ventilation and increases fruit yield, reduces the proportion of unmarketable fruit, enhances the production of high quality fruits, prevent diseases of fruit rot, allows better aeration and exposes the foliage to sunlight for photosynthetic activities. The relevant literature pertaining to the trailing, stacking and plant densities on growth, yield and yield attributes is reviewed and presented here under with the following sub-heads in different cucurbits.

Pages: 2151-2154  |  2610 Views  1764 Downloads

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