Abstract:
Synthetic herbicides contaminate environment, pollute underground water and cause health hazards and develop weed resistance. Conventional weed control techniques are backbreaking, tiresome and time consuming. Problems caused by commercial herbicides demand for exploring alternative weed control methods. A field experiment was conducted at Agronomy Research Farm, University of Agriculture Peshawar, Pakistan during 2014-15 to evaluate the allelopathic potential of sunflower (Gulshan-98) water extracts (SWE) on weeds density and yield of wheat cultivar 'AttaHabib-2010'. Randomized complete block design having four replications was used. The experiment was consisted of four concentrations (1:3, 1:4, 1:5 and 1:6 kg L-1) of sunflower extract and three application times (emergence (E), tillering (T) and half at E + half at T). Herbicides (H) application, hand weeding (HW) and control plots were also included for comparison. Herbicide application showed 45 % suppression of weeds density and increased plant height (12%), leaf area tiller-1 (23%), spike length (16%) and grain yield (17%) over SWE. Likewise, HW plots showed 36% suppression of weeds, and increased plants height (11%), leaf area tiller-1 (20%), spikes length (13.6%), and grain yield (15.6%) over SWE. While SWE resulted in 46% reduction in weeds density and increased plants height, leaf area, spike length and grain yield of wheat (14, 26, 17 and 76%) respectively over control. Application of 1:3 SWE resulted in lower weeds density, taller plants, more leaf area tiller-1, longer spikes, and high grain yield of wheat. Among application times SWE applied at tillering resulted in lower weeds density, maximum leaf area tiller-1, more spike length and high grain yield. It is concluded from the data that SWE with 1:3 concentration applied at tillering reduced weeds density by 52% and increased wheat yield by 100% over control and is recommended for suppressing weeds and enhancing wheat productivity in agro-climatic conditions of Peshawar valley.
Page(s):
221-232
DOI:
DOI not available
Published:
Journal: Pakistan Journal of Weed Science Research, Volume: 23, Issue: 2, Year: 2017
Keywords:
Wheat
,
Sunflower
,
grain yield
,
Allelopathy
,
water extract
,
weeds density