 Welcome dear learners, today we shall discuss about wheat management in tea. We shall discuss about wheat in tea plantation, their types and their management practices. Before going to the main contents, let me define what is wheat? Wheat are basically the plants growing in an area where they are neither desired nor appreciated. Wheat compete with the crop for the nutrients, sunlight, carbon dioxide, moisture and space. Most of the wheat's harbore may many paste and diseases which attack the main crops. Some wheat hinder harvesting of tea by covering the plucking surface and also creating physical obstruction to the pluckers. So in tea plantation, wheat is not a major problem, especially in case of mature tea, because mature tea canopy covers the ground. But nursery and young tea plants suffers a permanent setback in vigor if proper wheat control measures are not taken at appropriate time, which are a problem in prune fields and need to be controlled till the puses cover the ground. Now when the wheat competition is more in tea or any other crop field, there are some critical period of wheat competition in tea garden and if you see in the case of Assam, a state of northeastern India, the critical period of wheat competition is between April and September that is during the monsoon. Now what are the types of wheat? How these wheat are classified? Wheat are classified on the basis of duration of their life cycle as annuals, biennials and perennials. Morphologically, maize or wheat belong to either monocotillatinas which are having narrow leaves or dicotillatinas which are having the broad leaves. Now in tea garden, what types of wheat are normally seen? They are spaces of grasses, monocotillatinas and dicotillatinas which basically infest the tea fields. Some example of wheat seen in the tea garden of major tea growing area of the world are like annual meadow grass, bermuda grass, torpedo grass, polygonum, American drop, large leaf, wood, choral. So these are common weeds which are dominant in the tea growing area of the world. Now come to the control method that is how we will manage these weeds. There are various control methods. Among those if we see the mechanical methods hand weeding, sickling, chilling, forking and malsinger generally done for wheat control in tip plantations. Hand weeding is carried out in the nurseries and in the newly planted tea areas where application of chemical herbicide is prohibited or hazardous for the young plants. Chilling that is also called as surface scraping. It is an efficient means of suppressing wheat with a minimum soil disturbance. Chilling is useful in controlling the cellar rooted wheat when their density is high and a large area is to be weeded. Now sickling. Sickling is basically done to control the vigorous growth of tall weeds and deep rooted weeds growing around the collar of the bushes can be removed by forking. Another important operation is mousing which is very effective in controlling wheat growth. The growth of wheat has to be constantly checked before they reach the flowering phase. Therefore the weeding should be done at least every 8 to 10 weeks so as to control them before they reach a height of 10 to 15 centimeter which is also facilitated fertilizer application. The border areas of tea fields, roadsides, steeps there and etcetera should be kept wheat free by slush weeding in order to avoid continuous dispersal of wheat seeds to the adjoining tea fields. Now let's see the effect of weeds at different stages of tea plant. In tea plantation, weeds are seen from the nursery to the mature tea field. However in mature tea field the wheat infestation is less as I have mentioned earlier. Early and young tea plants are more susceptible to wheat infestation therefore proper wheat control methods need to be followed. Generally we should avoid the only chemical method of wheat control as much as possible. In what happened in nursery plant up to 6 months of planting of cuttings application of chemical is strictly prohibited, totally prohibited and rather it is better to follow integrated wheat management practices where manual chemical, biological and ecological methods are combined in order to achieve cost effective and eco friendly wheat management. So dear learners we came to the end of the discussion and it is seen that if proper management is not taken at proper time which can create serious problem in the tea plantation.