Journal of Krishi Vigyan

The field experiments were carried out to evaluate the effect of irrigation, fertigation and plastic mulching in bitter gourd variety Preethi in randomised block design with factorial combination of treatments having 18 treatments and 3 replications. Effect of three levels of irrigation (60%, 80% and100% ET) applied through drip, two levels of mulching (no mulch and mulching with silver-black plastic mulch) and three levels of fertiliser (75%, 100% and 125% of NPK dose 210: 74: 225 kg/ha) applied as fertigation using water soluble fertilisers were studied. The results indicated that the highest irrigation and fertigation levels (100%Ep and 125%NPK dose) along with plastic mulching significantly enhanced the length of main vine, number of primary branches, dry matter content of leaves and vine, fruit dry mater content, harvest index and N, P, K and iron content of fruits. However, higher doses of irrigation, fertigation and mulching lead to decrease in the ascorbic acid content of fruits. Plastic mulching resulted in early opening of male and female flowers on lower nodes and facilitated 8.64 days early harvest. While increasing the fertigation dose, from 75 to 100 per cent, increased dry matter content of fruits by 37.29 per cent, further increase from 100 to 125 per cent resulted in an increase of only 6.26 per cent. Drip fertigation using water soluble fertilisers along with silver-black plastic mulching can be effectively used for attaining higher production and early harvest in bitter gourd variety Preethi in Kerala.