Influence of Weeding on the Performance of White Maize Varieties

The experiment was conducted at agronomy farm of Sher-e-Bangla Agricultural University, Dhaka from November 2017 to April 2018 to investigate the influence of weeding regimes on the performance of white maize varieties. The experiment comprised two varieties viz. YANGNUO-3000 and PSC-121, designated as V1 and V2 respectively combined with four weed control treatments viz. T0 = No weeding, T1 = One hand weeding at 60 DAS (days after sowing), T2 = two hand weeding at 40 DAS and 60 DAS and T3 = Weed free after 40 DAS. The experiment was laid out in RCBD (factorial) with three replications. PSC-121 showed the superior performance in terms of plant height, leaf number plant-1, number of grains cob-1 (468.75), 100 grains weight (35.0837 g), grain yield (8.28 t ha-1), stover yield (6.56 t ha-1) and harvest index (55.58%) over YANGNUO-3000. In the case of weed control treatments, the highest plant height, leaf number plant-1, number of grains cob-1 (464.54), 100 grains weight (37 g), grain yield (9.25 t ha-1) and stover yield (7.46 t ha-1) were reported from T3. All the parameters studied were found lowest with T0. However, in terms of interaction, no single interaction was superior to other alternatives. But in most of the cases V2T3 showed the highest values regarding the maximum plant height, leaf number plant-1, number of grains cob-1 (494.97) and 100 grains weight (38 g). V2T3 showed the highest grain yield (9.33 t ha-1), whereas, V1T0 showed the lowest grain yield (5.49 t ha-1). The lowest weed density and weed biomass (12.17 no. m-2 and 4.33 g·m-2) was recorded from T3. The highest weed control efficiency (94.38%) was also recorded from T3. In the case of variety V2 showed better performance in terms of weed density, weed biomass and WCE (46.32%).