Mustard Sixth to seventh week practices

Bihar hairy caterpillar:

Symptoms:

• Young larvae feed gregariously mostly on the under surface of the leaves.
• Caterpillars feed on leaves and in severe infestation the whole crop is defoliated.

Management:

• Apply chlorpyriphos 20 EC @ 1.5 lit/ha or triazophos 40 EC @ 0.8 Lit/ha or quinalphos 25 EC @ 1.5 lit/ha.
• Dust Chlorpyriphos 1.5% DP quinalphos 1.5% @ 25 kg/ha when the population is likely to reach 10/m row length (ETL). Repeat it as needed.

Powdery mildew:

Symptoms:

• The disease attacks on the lower leaves as small circular brown necrotic spots which slowly increase in size.
• Many concentric spots coalesce to cover large patches showing blightening and defoliation in severe cases.
• Circular to linear, dark brown lesions also develop on stems and pods, which are elongated at later stages.
• Infected pods produce small, discoloured and shriveled seeds.

Cultural control: 

• Follow timely sowing of seeds. 
• Adopt proper field sanitation. 
• Destruct crop infected crop residues. 
• Apply potash in recommended dose

Chemical control:

• Three sprays of aqueous suspensions of Triadimefon 25 WP (0.1%), Tridemorph 80 EC (0.1%), Dinocap 48 EC (0.075%) and Wettable Sulfur 80 WP (0.3%), at 15 day intervals, after disease appearance, controlled the disease effectively and increased seed yields.