A note on the Oil Content of Castor Seed (Ricinus communis L.) from Spikes of Different Orders.

Abstract

Castor is an important commercial crop which is industrially valued for the oil which its seeds contain. (Castor plant produces a number of branches and terminal bud of each branch transforms into a fruiting spike. The primary or the main spike is first to emerge, 20-30 days later, secondary branches emerge and at the same intervals tertiary, quaternary. Sethi (1931) observed that earlier formed beans contain more oil than the lateral ones and that the seeds borne on the main fruiting spike are richer in oil content than those on the secondary or tertiary branches. Studies by Kulkarni (1959) also revealed that the oil content of tertiary spikes differed significantly from that of tertiary spikes. In the present studies, an attempt was made to find out whether such differences exist in the oil content of spikes of various orders in NPH-1 (New Pusa Hyderabad Castor-1), a recent short duration (150 days) castor of high promise, developed by Ankineedu and Kulkarni (1968). HC-6 (Himayat Sagar Castor-6), a popular long duration (240 days) varieiy of Andhra Pradesh was also included in this type of study to determine varietal differences and also variety X order interactions.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.29321/MAJ.10.002509

Pages

39 -

Creative Commons

Copyright

© The Author(s), 2026. Published by Madras Agricultural Students' Union in Madras Agricultural Journal (MAJ). This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited by the user.

Keywords