Influence of different growing media on the growth and development of strawberry plants

Abstract

The optimal production of strawberries requires the essential nutrients and favourable media for vegetative and reproductive growth. The present study sought to determine the effectiveness of growth parameters and fruit yield of strawberries in different media growing under a greenhouse. To analyze the significant effect for the growth and fruit yield among the growing media, four treatments such as control soil (CS), bio plus compost (T-1), the combination of bio plus compost, and synthetic nutrient applied media/integrated media (T-2) and synthetic nutrient applied soil media (T-3) were assayed. Morphology parameters like plant height, canopy area, fresh weight, dry weight of roots were measured in each stage after eight weeks and sixteen weeks and yield attributing parameter as the number of fruits set per plant and number of fruits per plant were measured at the beginning and end of the reproductive stage eight and sixteen weeks respectively. The effects of growing media for the strawberry plant growth and productivity were analyzed using completely randomized block designs through analyzing the variance with a significance level of p < 0.05. The canopy area of the strawberry plants was calculated using the image processing technique applied in HSV colour space. Correspondingly, the vegetative stage and reproductive stage of T-2 plants attained the maximum plant height of 16.93 +/- 0.31 cm and 19.34 +/- 0.21 cm, canopy area with 23.02 +/- 1.94 cm(2) and 28.78 +/- 0.93 cm(2), fresh weight of 18.00 +/- 3.06 g, and 20.15 +/- 3.49 g, dry weight of 5.15 +/- 1.26 g and 6.66 +/- 2.34 g and the number of fruits set per plant 18.83 +/- 2.64 and number of fruits per plant 24.17 +/- 2.14 followed by T-1, T-3, and CS respectively. A comparison of the relative growth and fruit yield at the vegetative and reproductive phases of plants T-2 implied better performance. This study demonstrated that bio plus compost with synthetic nutrients act as a better source for the growth and production of strawberries under the greenhouse.