Abstract

An experiment with rice as a test crop was conducted at the Experimental Farm, Shalimar Campus of Sher-e-Kashmir University of Agricultural Sciences and Technology of Kashmir during the kharif season of 2005 to investigate the influence of different plant spacings and seedlings per hill on growth characters, yield attributes and yield of newly released transplanted rice variety Shalimar Rice-1. The experiment was laid out in Randomized Block Design with factorial arrangement assigning combination of spacings and number of seedlings hill^-1 with three replications. The results revealed that grain yield, yield attributes and growth characters were influenced by different spacings. Closer spacing (15 × 15 cm) recorded higher plant height, tillers m^-2, leaf area index, dry matter accumulation as well as yield attributes. Significantly higher grain yield of 67.1 q ha^-1 showing a superiority of 8.97% with 15 × 15 cm was observed over that of 20 × 20 cm spacing. Also, the closer spacing intercepted maximum photosynthetically active radiation (PAR) than wider spacing.  Among, the number of seedling hill^-1, highest grain yield 9.79% with 3-seedings hill^-1 was recorded than transplanting of 5-seedlings hill^-1. Regarding yield attributes higher values were observed with 3-seedlings hill^-1 being at par with 2-seedlings hill^-1.

Key words: Plant density, rice, seedling number hill^-1, tillering, transplanting.