African Journal of Agricultural Research Vol. 2 (1), pp. 019-026, January 2007 Available online at http://www.academicjournals.org/AJAR ISSN 1991- 637X © 2007 Academic Journals Full Length Research Paper Effect of plastic mulch on economizing irrigation water and weed control in baby corn sown by different methods Gulshan Mahajan*, Rakesh Sharda, Ashwani Kumar and K.G. Singh Department of Soil and Water Engineering, Punjab Agricultural University, Ludhiana, India – 141004 Accepted 5 January, 2007 Field experiments were conducted during the winter season of 2003 -04 and 2004 -05 to determine the effect of mulch in relation to irrigation and planting method on soil temperature, weed control, baby corn growth, water use and yield. The study revealed that bed planting of baby corn caused 34.9% increase in yield over ridge planting method. Plastic mulch increased baby corn yield by 18.9% and 77.5% over rice straw and unmulched treatment respectively. Baby corn yield at irrigation level of 1.2 ETc proved significantly superior to 1.0 ETc and 0.8 ETc levels. The study further revealed that plastic mulch at irrigation level of 0.8 ETc resulted significant increase in yield by 28.6% over unmulched soil condition even when it was irrigated at 1.2 ETc and resulted 30.6% of water saving. It was interesting that in bed planting method, plastic mulch caused statistically same baby corn yield at all the levels of irrigation with maximum water use efficiency of 40.1 kg/ha-cm at irrigation level of 0.8 ETc, while in ridge planting method the baby corn yield was statically same only at irrigation level of 1.2 ETc and 1.0 ETc, while at 0.8 ETc it decreased significantly. Key words: Baby corn, irrigation, plastic mulch, planting method, weeds, water use efficiency, soil temperature. INTRODUCTION Babycorn is a dehusked maize ear harvested within 2 - 3 days of silk emergence, but prior to fertilization (Pandey et al., 2002). Baby corn is used in preparing a wide variety of traditional and intercontinental dishes, besides being canned. Good quality green fodder is a bye product of it and would boost dairy farming. Baby corn cultivation pro-vides avenues for crop diversification, value addition and revenue generation. Being a widely spaced crop, it suffers heavy yield loss due to severe competition offered by weeds. Besides this, poor germination, scanty rainfall and slow growth in winter season are major limiting factors to quality and early production of baby corn for premium market. Timely irrigation is an important input for good quality of baby corn. So cultivation of crop demands efficient ways of utilizing any water reserves available to plants as the water requirement of the crop is high. Evaporation from the soil surface may account for as much as 50% of the total moisture lost from the soil during the gro wing season for soybean and corn (Shaw, 1959). In this context, mulching with plant residues and *Corresponding author. E-mail:mahajangulshan@rediffmail.com synthetic materials is a well-established technique for increasing the profitability of many horticultural crops (Duranti and Cuocolo, 1989; Gimenez et al., 2002). Such effects are mainly contributed to the capacity of mulch to conserve soil moisture (Vavrina and Roka, 2000) and increase early soil temperature (Shaw, 1959). It is clear that future increase in food productions which are required to keep pace with the escalating world population must be achie-ved without depleting our natural resource base of soil, water and air. Probably the greatest issue in maintaining sustainable agricultural production over the next few dec-ades will be the availability of water. Irreplaceable water supplies are already being used at an alarming rate as a result water table is going down day by day, and the agri-culture is increasingly competing with urban and Indus-trial water requirements. Moreover, excessive use of herbicides for the control of weeds had led to the problem of herbicide resistance in many crops. In this context, mulching may prove beneficial for crop growth because of complex change in soil environment through modifying soil tempe- rature, reduction in evaporation, weed competition, soil compaction and erosion. Considering the agricultural importance, the work done on the influence of mulches