The Resilience Status of the Sesame Plant Against Weeds and Insects

Sesame is overrated as a resilient crop due to its ability to withstand unfavourable conditions either through replacement of damaged tissues or by its profuse seed production. This article offers an examination of weed as a stressor of neglected field‐grown sesame. We provide a thorough assessment of resilience to weed competition and subsequent exposition to insect incidence. Using initial seeds collected from sesame plants growing along roadsides, we measured the agronomic profiles of field‐grown sesame, including plant growth and survival, capsule and seed attributes, and incidence of insects in a 3 year study. Our results indicate that sesame, like all crops, cannot be produced as a neglected wild crop without adequate cultural practices, including pest management. All treatments that received at least one weeding per season had significantly ( p > 0.001) taller plants than the weed‐stressed plants. Fields that were weeded four times during the 90‐day plant phenology significantly ( p > 0.001) produced more seeds: (17.3 g/plant) than fields with weeding regimens of zero (0 g/plant), one (7.1 g/plant) or two (8.5 g/plant) times after initial sowing in a season. Vegetative growth parameters were highly stable across the 3 years for most of the indices compared. However, the weight of single seeds showed low correlations between the experimental years, with a range of 20%–32%. Sesame monocrops under no plant protection conditions are unable to recover from pest damage, leading to approximately zero yield. Expected insect taxa from two notorious sesame pest orders (Lepidoptera and Hemiptera) and alarmingly, termites were observed. This study provides essential data on, weed as an unconditional stressor of sesame, new insect pest culprits of sesame in Ghana and a caution for growers trying to adopt sesame with the mindset of an easy‐to‐cultivate crop without adequate resource allocation.