Prospect of Indigenous Plant Extracts in Tea Pest Management

Tea is a popular beverage made from the leaves of evergreen shrub or tree Camellia sinensis, under the family Theaceae. Tea plant is subjected to the attack of insects, mites, nematodes and some plant pathogenic diseases. Tea production is greatly hindered due to these maladies. About 10-15% crop loss occurred by these pests per annum. In severe cases, it would be 100%. To combat these problems different groups of pesticides have been used in the tea fields since 1960. As tea is a consumable commodity, the effect of residue of pesticides in made tea is harmful to human health. In this context, biopesticides are being considered as environmentally safe, selective, biodegradable, economical and renewable alternatives for use in IPM programmes. Biopesticides are natural plant products and may be grown by the planters with minimum cost and extracted by indigenous methods. Biopesticides are secondary metabolites, which include alkaloids, terpenoids, phenolics, and minor secondary chemicals. It is estimated that as many as 2121 plant species have been reported to posses pest control properties. Botanicals like neem, ghora-neem, mahogoni, karanja, adathoda, sweet flag, tobacco, derris, annona, smart weed, bar weed, datura, calotropis, bidens, lantana, chrysanthemum, artemisia, marigold, clerodendrum, wild sunflower and many others may be grown by planters with minimum expense and extracted by indigenous methods. These botanical materials can be used as an alternative to chemical pesticides. These botanical extracts will help in controlling major pests of tea such as Helopeltis, red spider mite, aphids, thrips, jassid, flushworm, termites, nematodes etc. The present note reviews the information of most widely available indigenous plants that may be used for the control of insect pests of tea as a component of IPM. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3329/ijarit.v1i1-2.13924 Int. J. Agril. Res. Innov. & Tech. 1 (1&2): 16-23, December, 201

Yield Performances and Cup Quality of Some BTRI Test Clones of Tea

A long term experiment was conducted to investigate the yield and quality performances of four vegetative propagated test clones of tea coded as A/8/01, A/17/22, A/22/27 and A/22/40 at Bangladesh Tea Research Institute (BTRI) farm during 1996-2010. A standard clone BT1 was considered as control. Cuttings of the test clones were collected from the selected bushes of Amo tea estates and were raised at BTRI nursery. Then saplings were put to long term yield and quality trial following Latin Square Design (LSD) with 3 replications. The green leaf was harvested at weekly interval during the plucking season starting from mid March to mid December throughout the experimental period. Yield data were recorded and analyzed statistically using MSTAT programme. Results of the experiment revealed that among the test clones A/22/40 gave the highest significant yield of 3509.1 kg ha-1 of made tea followed by BT1 (3203.69 kg ha-1), A/8/01 (2912.24 kg ha-1), A/17/22 (2817.76 kg ha-1) and A/22/27 (2278.78 kg ha-1) from the average of 9 years (2002-2010) at mature stage. At immature stage i.e. 1st year to 5th year after plantation yield difference was insignificant. The overall cup quality of the test clones was assessed by conventional organoleptic test. The cup quality of A/8/01, A/17/22, A/22/40 as well as the standard clone BT1 was found to be above average (AA) while the cup quality of A/22/27 was average (A). Considering the yield and quality potentials, the test clone A/22/40 has appeared quite promising to be released as a standard clone. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3329/ijarit.v1i1-2.13925 Int. J. Agril. Res. Innov. & Tech. 1 (1&2): 24-28, December, 201