HIND AGRICULTURAL RESEARCH AND TRAINING INSTITUTE F loriculture has been identified as the fast-emerging sector and is now branded as an industry in domestic as well as export market. The area under floriculture crop has risen to approximately 1.91 lack hectares, globally India occupies fourth place in total area for growing ornamental plants with an estimated production of 1.031 million loose and 690.27 million cut flowers (Anonymous, 2013 and Singh and Singh, 2017). Looking the present situation of the gladiolus in India, it is noticed that the level of productivity is very low. The production of gladiolus can be enhanced by adopting different measure such as increasing area under cultivation, use of improved high yielding and short duration verities, supplementing with nutrient requirement, adopting appropriate plant protection measure and Development and performance evaluation of prototype single row gladiolus planter Padam Singh, Triveni Prasad Singh and Ashutosh Mishra Received : 13.10.2017; Revised : 08.03.2018; Accepted : 20.03.2018 ABSTRACT : Gladiolus is also known as “queen of the flowers” is an important cash horticultural crop. Generally it is planted manually which is very tedious, time consuming and labor intensive operation. So far, there is no planter available for planting of gladiolus corms. With a view of mechanize the planting operation of this horticultural crop,atractor one of the popular bulbous ornamental plants. Traditionally the gladiolus corm are planted manually which is very high tedious, time consuming and labour intensive operation. A single row tractor operated prototype planter was developed to improve planting efficiency and reduce drudgery involved in manual planting method and its performance was evaluated in actual field condition. The three levels were selected for corm spacing viz., 15, 20 and 25 cm and three for forward speed viz., 1.0, 1.5 and 2.0 km/h were taken as performance parameter for the developed prototype planter. The indicator namely missing index, multiple index, mechanical damage, corm spacing per meter length and properties of gladiolus corms etc. determined during the test. KEY WORDS : Co-efficient of uniformity, Corm spacing, Field capacity, Gladiolus planter HOW TO CITE THIS PAPER : Singh, Padam, Singh, Triveni Prasad and Mishra, Ashutosh (2018). Development and performance evaluation of prototype single row gladiolus planter . Internat. J. Agric. Engg., 11(1) : 227-232, DOI: 10.15740/HAS/IJAE/11.1/227-232. International Journal of Agricultural Engineering | Volume 11 | Issue 1 | April, 2018 | 227-232 RESEARCH PAPER  e ISSN–0976–7223 Visit us : www.researchjournal.co.in DOI: 10.15740/HAS/IJAE/11.1/227-232 efficient machinery for its cultivation. The current and future demands are for horticulture and floriculture machinery as more and more farmers are moving towards it to achieve profit in farming. Agricultural machines increases productivity of land and labour both by the management of timeliness of farm operation and increased work out put per unit time. Sowing / planting of gladiolus is considered as one of the most important operation which involve factor like correct seed rate, appropriate depth of placement and require spacing and orientation which determines the crop production. The time and method adopted for sowing decisively affect the germination and hence, production. The traditionally method of planting gladiolus as adopted by farmers, is to make shallow furrow dig with the spade See end of the Paper for authors’ affiliation Correspondence to : Padam Singh College of Forestry, Veer Chandra Singh Garhwali Uttarakhand University of Horticulture and Forestry, Ranichauri, Tehri Garhwal (Uttarakhand) India Email : padamsingh1990@ gmail.com