Rainy season onion
Md. Nurul Alam Public Relations & Protocol Cell BKB, H.O, Dhaka.
Onion is an essential element with various eatables all over the world from prehistoric times. For us onion is preferable to heavenly foods. Onion is generally produced in Bangladesh as winter crop. So there remains an acute shortage of this item before the new harvest in winter. To meet this scarcity, the government has to spend a huge amount of foreign currency for importing 15 less cultivated crops like pulses, spices and oil seeds. To deal with the problems, Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute (BARI) has taken a programme to produce rainy season onion. The cultivation of rainy season onion has been started at Natore. Summer onion is of different types. The rainy season onion is a new variety and an innovative one in the field of onion cultivation. It requires 150-160 days from sowing seeds to harvest. Seeds have to be spread from the last week of April to second week of May. The seedlings of 40-45 days are sown in the root land. Crops are harvested within four months from the time of sowing. People think that it is quite possible to meet up extra demand of onion by cultivating rainy season onion successfully. The seed beds of rainy season onion has been established at Natore Horticulture Centre with the help of the 'Integrated Entrepreneurship and Nutrition Development Project' of DAE. Three hundred gram seeds were sown on April 30, 2005 for the first time experimentally. After 47 days seedlings were sown and harvested on 7 October. On the other hand, the land pattern for cultivating rainy season onion is same as the summer season one. Doash and sandy soil are specially fit for the cultivation of rainy season onion. For rainy season onion, high land is needed so that the stored water of rainfall may get down quickly. The characteristics of required land are the same for both types.
|
|
