Agricultural Research Journal

The field experiment was conducted during rabi 2019-20 and 2020-21 to study the effect of growing environment on agroclimatic indices and yield of chickpea. Chickpea was grown with four dates of sowing (25 October, 5 November, 15 November and 25 November) and two chickpea varieties (PBG 8 and PBG 7) replicated four times in a split plot design keeping dates of sowing in main plots and varieties in sub plots. Maximum calendar days (177 days) were taken by 25 October sown crop to attain the physiological maturity followed by 5 November (170 days), 15 November (166 days) and 25 November (159 days) sown crop. Chickpea variety PBG 7 took more number of days to attain maturity as compared to PBG 8. Maximum growing degree days were accumulated in 25 October (1259.6°C day) sowing followed by 5 November (1158.3°C day), 15 November (1086.2°C day) and 25 November (1048.7°C day) sowing. Among different dates of sowing, crop sown on 5 November showed superiority over other dates by producing more number of branches per plant and pods per plant. The 5 November sown crop recorded 13.1, 3.9 and 14.9% higher seed yield over 25 October, 15 November and 25 November sowing date. The chickpea variety PBG 8 produced significantly higher yield attributes (pods per plant and 100 seed weight) and 10.3% higher grain yield than PBG 7. Therefore, it can be concluded that 5-15 November sown chickpea variety PBG 8 could be a good practice or alternative to get higher productivity of chickpea.