Green Global
Foundation   Journal
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INFLUENCE OF SOWING DATE ON QUALITY SEED PRODUCTION OF BITTER GOURD (Pages : 17 - 21)

Bitter gourd is a vegetable grown for its edible fruit and also popular due to its medicinal properties. Though seeds are being used for propagation, thick seed coat and high seed deterioration rate are major problems associated low field germination. Sowing of seed at optimum time is important for quality seed production. Hence, a study was conducted at the field research farm of Seed Technology Division, Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute (BARI), Gazipur, Bangladesh during September 2009 to May 2011 to select the optimum sowing date for quality seed production of bitter gourd and to find out a relationship between seed quality parameters and prevailing weather condition. Six different sowing dates viz., 1 October, 1 November, 1 December, 1 January, 1 February and 1 March were used in this study. Results revealed that there was significant difference on fruits plant-1, seeds fruit-1, 100 seed weight and seed yield ha-1. Seed yield of bitter gourd increased gradually from 1 November sowing to 1 February sowing. This might be due to prevailing higher temperature at flowering stage. The highest seed yield (176.42 kg ha-1) was obtained from 1 February sowing. This treatment also showed better seed quality in respect to seed germination (93.33%) and vigor index (10.66).Download