Abstract

Onion is popular among the farmers because of its commercial value. In Maharashtra, it is mainly grown as a commercial vegetable crop on an area of 66.5 thousand hectares with production of 804.0 thousand tones of bulbs and is leading in the country. Cropweed competition has long been recognized as one of the major constraints for low production of onion. Weeds cause reduction of 40-80% of bulb yield (Patel et al., 1983). Due to closer planting and shallow root system of onion, manual weeding is tedious, expensive and time consuming. Moreover, non availability of sufficient labour at critical period of crop weed competition and some time field conditions do not permit the manual weeding. The average bulb yield of onion can be improved through combination of proper chemical and mechanical weed control at appropriate time. Keeping this in view the present study was undertaken to compare the effect of different weed control methods on irrigated onion

Keywords: Onion, Weed management