The quality of seed to a great extent depends on the appropriate stage of the fruits at the time of harvest. Hence it becomes crucial to underline the optimum stage of harvesting the fruits for seed purpose. It has also been observed that if the harvested fruits of gourd crops are kept for some time before the extraction, it further improves the quality of seeds. It thus becomes important to specify the post harvest period (after ripening) also till seed extraction for improvement in the seed quality. The present investigation was conducted in a factorial RBD with three replications to study the influence of different stages of seed maturity with different after ripening durations on the quality of ridge gourd seeds with the objective of identifying the optimum harvesting and seed extraction stage for obtaining good quality seeds.

Anupam Singh: Completed M.Sc.(Ag) with specialization in horticulture from U.P. College, Varanasi, India; Senior Research Fellow at Indian Institute of Vegetable Research, Varanasi; having published couple of research papers and no. of abstracts, popular articles in the field of horticulture/agriculture