INTEGRATED WEED MANAGEMENT IN SESAME

At the Research and Experimental Station Farm, Faculty of Agriculture, Ain Shams University at Shalakan, Kalubia Governorate, Egypt, two field experiments were carried out during the 2006 and 2007 growing seasons to study the response of sesame growth, yield and the associated weeds to three manual weed management (hand hoeing twice, hoeing once and unweeded), and cultural weed management i.e., four plant geometrical distributions (planting on one side of the ridge with either 10 cm-hill distance and one plant/hill [G1] or 20 cm-hill distance and two plants/hill [G2] as well as planting on the two sides of the ridge with either 20 cm-hill distance and one plant/hill [G3] or 40 cmhill distance with two plants/hill [G4]. .Results showed that weeds that grew with hoed twicesesame plants received less light, producing poor biomass. Also, hoeing twice was the superior weed control treatment for increasing LA, LAI, yield components and biological, seed and oil yields/fed. G1 and G2 patterns surpassed G4 for reducing light intensity, and exceeded G3 as well as G4 for decreasing weed biomass. Moreover, G1 and G2 patterns were the superior and equal for enhancing LA, LAI, plant height, weight of capsules and seeds/plant as well as biological, seed and oil yields/fed. There is a significant and negative relation between sesame seed yield either with weed biomass or transmitted light. Whereas, the corresponding relation was significantly positive with LAI. Multiple regression equation referred to that the weed biomass and transmitted light increase as well as LAI decreases by one unit, the seed yield decreases by 0.68, 0.26 and 76.3 kg/fed., respectively.