A review on nursery management in horticultural crops: A beneficial way for enhancing income

Abstract

The present study is based on the nursery management in horticultural crops for enhancing income. The aim of good nursery management is to make available planting material of the highest possible quality for new development areas and replanting. Poor planting materials lead to low yield and increasing total cost. This study is covered all key aspects of the nursery management including the importance of nursery, types of nursery, management of nursery including various activities like potting the seedling, manuring, irrigation, plant protection measures, weed control, packing of nursery plants, sale management and management of mother plants, plant protection and general safety issues regarding to nursery management and important tools for nursery management. Introduction A nursery is a place where plants are grown, nurtured and sold out. Generally, various commercial crop growers require a good quality saplings or grafts of genuine type. It can also defined nursery is a place or an establishment for raising or handling of young vegetable or fruit seedlings until they are ready for more permanent planting. The aim of good nursery management is to provide planting material of the highest possible quality for new development areas and replanting. Poor planting materials will lead to low yield and unnecessary thinning cost top rid off runts in planted field. So, the selection of good planting materials and strict culling in nursery are the important step. The importance of the best quality planting material as an initial investment is a well realized factor for persons engaged in Horticulture field. So nurseries have great demand for the production of plants, bulbs, rhizomes, suckers, cuttings and grafts. But in general good quality and assured planting material at reasonable price is not available. So persons having a skill of propagation of plants can go for this avenue as an agro-business of future. Seedling production is a major expense of a forestation and every effort should be made to produce good quality seedlings at a reasonable cost. To this end mastering the techniques of nursery operations is essential means nursery management is very essential. (Mbora et al., 2008) [6] India is endowed with a remarkably heterogeneous area characterized by a great diversity of agro climatic zones, allowing for production of a variety of horticultural crops such as fruits, vegetables, flowers, spices, plantation crops, root and tuber crops spices and medicinal and aromatic crops. India ranks second in fruits and vegetables production in the world, after China. Under agriculture sector horticultural crops play very important role to economy (Meena et al., 2013; Meena et al., 2016) [7, 8]. As per National Horticulture Database published by National Horticulture Board, during 2018-19 India produced 98.579 million metric tonnes of fruits and 185.883 million metric tonnes of vegetables (NHB, 2018-19) [9]. Horticulture is the cultivation of garden plants, fruits, berries, nuts, vegetables, flowers, trees, shrubs and turf. Horticulturalists use modern nurseries for the production of seedlings and mother plants. These plants are propagated through different methods such as seeds, cutting, layering, budding and grafting. It comprises of nursery beds, paths irrigated channels etc. Nursery bed is defined as a prepared area in a nursery where seed is sown or into which seedlings or cuttings are raised. On the bases of kind of plants growing in them nursery beds are classified into seedling beds and transplant beds, seedlings, beds are those nursery beds in which seedlings are raised either for, transplanting in other beds or for planting out.