Performance of wheat varieties under different sowing dates in Jharkhand

The field experiment was conducted at Birsa Agricultural University during 2010-11 and 2011-12 with objective to evaluate the performance of wheat varieties under different sowing dates. The experiment comprised of two dates of sowing i.e. 25th November and 20th December with five wheat varieties namely Raj 4229, K 0906, K 0307, HD 2733 and DBW 39. The experiment was laid out in split plot design replicated four times. The soil of experimental plot was sandy loam in texture having low nitrogen (252.4 Kg ha-1), phosphorous (12.1 Kg ha- 1) and medium in potassium (155.6 Kg ha-1) with soil pH 6.1. Sowing of wheat on 25th November resulted in expressing significantly more total tillers (420 tillers m2), higher dry matter accumulation (1190 g m-2), higher crop growth rate (19.30 g m-2 /day) at maturity, and leaf area index (3.60) resulted in 14.7 per cent higher spike m-2 (400 spikes m-2), 26.43 per cent higher spike length (10.40 cm), 15.15 per cent higher number of grain per spike (39 grains/spike), 45.20 per cent higher grain yield (51.00 q ha-1). Wheat sown on 25th November achieves higher net return of ` 37400 with benefit: cost ratio of 1.34 which is 88.70 per cent higher than 20th December sown wheat. Among wheat varieties K 0307 proved superiority in total tillers (492 m-2), dry matter accumulation (1120.60 g m-2), grain yield (45.40 q ha-1), net return (` 31090 ha-1) and benefit: cost ratio (1.14) than that of mean of rest of the four varieties i.e. Raj 4229, K 0906, HD 2733 and DBW 39.