Praveen Kumar Singh, Phoolchandra Singh and Triyugi Nath

Maize is the one of the most important staple food crops amongst all of the cereal crops used in most of the country worldwide and that is why it’s known as the “queen of the cereals”. This is because of its very high nutritive values and especially protein for humans and animals (livestock). This crop can grow in the extremely diverse environments of India as well as the world. Observant of its impotence, a field experiment was carried out under a split-plot design with three levels of row spacing i.e., S₁, S₂, and S_3, and four levels of mulching i.e., no mulch (M₀), paddy straw mulch (M₁), green weed mulch (M₂) and dust mulch (M₃). The study was done to assess the impact of row spacing and mulching on the growth attributes of the maize. The plant height plant^-1 and the number of levees plant^-1 of the treated crop produced significantly higher growth attributes due to the effect of row spacing and mulching treatments. The significant treatment response was chronicled in the descending order for the row re-spacing as S₃ > S₂ > S₁ at 60 DAS and harvesting time during both the year of experimentation but the data at 30 DAS gave a non-significant response. The mulching treatment was chronicled in the descending order M₂ > M₃ > M₁ > M₀ during both the year of experimentation and was observed significant response among themselves at all the levels of observation. The data, in the case of the plant dry matter, was noticed in the ascending order and can chronicle for row re-spacing as S₁ > S₂ > S₃, and for mulching it was in the descending order M₁ > M₂ > M₃ > M₀ which was significant during both the years of experimentation. Similar results were also obtained with pooled data analysis. The interaction effect was like a copy of the results obtained above. The higher plant height and number of leaves were found in descending order with wider row spacing might be due to better aeration and sufficient radiation for plant photosynthesis resulted increased the growth of tested crop and higher plant dry weight was may be due to an increase in the plant populations between the row spacing and mulching.

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