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Ridge gourd is an important vegetable crop belonging to Cucurbitaceae. Crop is grown from seeds for their fruits. Fruit has high contents of Ca, P, Oxalic acid Vit. A and C. Boiled fruit is cathartic, expectorant, diuretic and nutritive, anthelmintic stomachic and antipyretic (J.F. Dastur,1964).

Crop suffers from a number of phytopathogenic fungi causing severe loss (Westcott,1969). R. bataticola associated with seed and cause charcoal root rot disease. Fungi transmit to stem and fruit from their seeds and causing severe phyto-pathological losses. These seeds can be treated with fungicides but repeated use of fungicides causes serious environmental problems and are toxic to non-targated organisms as well. Biocontrol is the best alternatives of fungicides as they have minimal environmental impacts in contrast to synthetic fungicides, so we used ecofriendly management to control seed-borne pathogen.

Review of literature has given in heading result and discussion.

Eight vegetable oils viz. mustard, coconut, groundnut, sesame, mahua, neem, linseed and castor oil and five replicates of 10 seeds for each treatment and for each sample were used. The seed tied in cheese cloth were kept in beaker containing oil heated at 50 and 70°C on a temperature controlled hot plate for 5 min and 10 min. The seeds were allowed to cool at room temperature and washed in 70% ethanol to remove excess of oil. These were air dried and plated on blotter (10 seeds/plate). Untreated seeds served as control. Observations on seed germination, incidence of pathogen and seedling infection were taken on 8th day of incubation.

The germination was significantly high in sesame oil 96% in 5 min. treatment and in linseed oil 92% in 10 min. treatment at 50⁰C temperature. At 70⁰C temperature, mustard oil gave maximum 76% germination in 5 min. treatment followed by linseed oil 74% and sesame oil 72%.

The effective control of pathogen incidence was observed in sesame oil (94.28%) in 5 min treatment followed by mustard and linseed oil (91.42%) at 50⁰ C.  At 70⁰ C, the best control of pathogen incidence was observed in sesame oil (85.71%) followed by mustard and linseed oil (77.14%) in 5 min treatment.

Highest seedling infection control (88.88%) was observed in sesame oil in 5 min treatment at 50 ⁰C followed by mustard and linseed oil (83.33%).  Seedling infection control was also maximum in sesame oil (77.77%) followed by linseed and mustard oil (72.22%) in 5 in treatment AT 70⁰C. In 10 min heated oil treatment mustard and sesame oil were most effective to control seedling infection.

Kumar (2000) observed maximum inhibition of F. oxysporum by linseed mustard and coconut oil in 5 min treatment at 70⁰C. Pyndji, Sinclair and Singh (1987) also studied that soybeen seeds stored for more than one year are more susceptible to heat treatment by oil thermotherapy than fleshy harvested seeds. According to them oil of refined maize,palm, soybeen and sunflower heated oil at 90⁰C for 10 minutes were most effective to control seed-borne infection of Cercospora kikucchi.

Singh et al. (1989) used six oils (neem, eucalyptus, ocimum, citrus, pine and oil from Cymbopogon nardus) against Sclerotium (Corticium rolfsii) Sacc. and some soil mycoflora, and found neem oil as a most effective against the pathogen. Mustard seed oil and Anethum graveolens were inhibitory to growth of Alternaria alternata, A. flavus, A. fumigatus and A. wentii (Kazmi et al., 1993). Atanda et al. (2007) and Dhingra et al. (2009) reported that various natural plant products are known to be effective against seed associated pathogen. Tian et al. (2011) found that conidial production was inversely proportional to the concentration of essential oils applied.

1. Atanda O O, Akpan I, Oluwafemi F (2007) The Potential of some spice essential oils in the control of Aspergillus parasiticus CFR223 and aflatoxin production. Food Control 18; 601-607

2. Dastur, J.F.1964 Useful plants of India and Pakistan. D.B. Tetraporevala Sonsand Pvt. Ltd.,Bombay pp 118

3. Dhingra O., Jham, G.N., Rodrigues F.A., Silva G.J. Costa M.L.N. (2009) Retardation in fungal deterioration of stored soybeen by fumigation with mustard essential oil. Australian Plant Pathology 38;540-545.       

4. Kazmi, A.R. Niaz, I. and Jilani, G. 1993. Evaluation of some plant extract and oils for antifungal properties. Pakistan Journal of Phytopath., 5(1-2): 93-97.

5. Kumar, D. 2000 Studies on seed-borne micro-organisms of Pigeon pea (Cajanus cajan L) Ph.D. Thesis. Univ. of Raj., Jaipur.

6. Pyndji, M.M., Sinclair, J.B.  and Singh, T.  1987.  Soybean seed thermotherapy with heated vegetable oils. Plant Disease 71: 213-216.

7. Singh, R.K., Shukla, R.P. and Dwivedi, R.S. 1989. Studies on fungitoxicity of oils against Sclerotium rolfsii Sacc. and soil mycoflora. National Academy Science Letters, 12(6); 183-185.

8. Tian J.,Ban X .,Zeng H.,Huang B.,Wang Y.(2011) chemical composition and antifungal activity  of essential oil from  Cicuta virosa  L. var. latisact   celak. International Journal of Food Microbiology.

9. Wescott,C. The Plant Doctor1969. Plant Disease Hand Book. Van Nastrand Reinhold Company, pp.585