Efficacy of Lignophenolic Composts for the Management of Bacterial Wilt of Tomato

Abstract

Bacterial wilt is one of the most dreaded diseases in tomato growing areas all over the world. Though chemical control measures and resistance breeding offers certain degree of protection against wilt pathogen, both have their own limitations such as high cost, environmental impact, non target effect and development of resistance. Hence, biologically safe methods such as use of composts as soil amendments for wilt management was investigated in the present study which revealed the possibility of the use of ligno-phenolic composts in disease management. Among the five composts tested, application of ayurvedic compost at 45 days after planting was found to be the most effective with lowest wilt incidence of 6.94 per cent against 36.10 per cent in control, with 80.77 per cent disease reduction. At 60 DAP, same trend was noticed with minimum disease incidence in ayurvedic compost (13.88 %) which was on par with full basal application of leaf litter compost (15.27 %), and coir pith compost (16.66 %) with 86.79 to 60.02 per cent reduction of wilt incidence. In case of yield, among the different composts, split and basal application of ayurvedic compost recorded highest yield of 8.9 kg/6.48 m<sup>2</sup>.