Vol. 10, Issue 10 (2021)

Author(s):
R Praveen, A Bandyopadhyay, DK Ghosh LKN and P Dutta

Abstract:
The study focused on cashew nursery by evaluating different types of degradable grafting tapes to obtain the quality growth in cashew nut planting material. The production of cashew grafts involves labour and single use polythene at different stages. An assessment of grafting performance of cashew nut was carried in a field study for two consecutive years during 2018-19 and 2019-20 using degradable grafting tapes to replace use of polythene tape in grafting. The results showed that, 180 days after grafting (DAG) among the different types of treatments maximum length of new scion growth (8.36 cm), higher number of scion leaves (15.76), highest incremental girth of graft joint (0.570 cm), highest incremental girth of scion (0.578 cm), highest incremental girth of root stock (0.584 cm), highest ratio of incremental girth of scion to root stock (0.990), maximum length of tap root (21.07 cm), maximum root diameter (1.21 cm), maximum root volume (6.15 ml), highest dry weight of total shoot biomass (10.73 g) and highest dry weight of total root biomass (2.11 g) were obtained with treatment buddy tape (T₃) followed by natural rubber grafting tape (T₁) which is on par with polythene grafting tape (T₅). Whereas, the treatment T₄ (Cotton grafting tape) resulted in significantly minimum growth rate for all the above studied parameters.Among the different treatment combinations, maximum gross income Rs985.00 was recorded in Buddy tape (T₃), maximum net returns of Rs 197.00 was recorded in treatment T₁ with the benefit cost ratio of 1.25 on account of higher graft survival percentage and lower cost of cultivation. Present study clearly indicated that, use of buddy tapes resulted in overall better performance with respect to growth and development but cost is high needs import. Whereas, natural rubber grafting tapes shows superior results over control for all above parameters with reduced graft care, readily locally available at lower cost, reduced environmental pollution and could be recommended for complete replacement of single use polythene tape in grafting process.