The Future of Growing Media for Herbaceous and Short Term Seasonal Pot Plants and Glasshouse Lettuce and Cut Flower Chrysanthemums

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The Future of Growing Media

for

Herbaceous and Short Term Seasonal Pot Plants

and

Glasshouse Lettuce and Cut Flower Chrysanthemums

Heidi Baker

FdSc Professional Floristry


Contents


  1. Introduction

A lot of nursery growers nowadays are looking for cheaper, less labour intensive and more reliable growing media than outdoors in disease infested soil.  There is also a growing amount of pressure from consumers to grow the crops in environmentally friendly media.  This report is going to look at the different types of growing media being used to grow herbaceous and short term seasonal pot plants (e.g. Lupins, Poinsettia and Cyclamen), glasshouse lettuce and cut flower chrysanthemums, and any new developments that may change this choice for nurseries in the future.

  1. Summary

It is very important for the grower to achieve the correct physical and nutritional conditions in their growing media for their crops to be successful.

Their growing media also has to be reliable.  If growers are going to stop using methyl bromide as a fumigator they need to be aware that some media containing soil can react when steam sterilised (for example an increase in the amount of water-soluble and exchangeable forms of manganese) and the damage to the crop may not be noticed until it is too late (Bunt, 1976)

The growers need to be reassured about any new product that comes on to the market, as any mistake no matter how small could cost the nursery their entire crop.


  1. Herbaceous and short term seasonal pot plants

  1. Main production techniques and cropping practices

Most pot plants sold in the UK are imported through the Dutch auction houses so it is hard to gain an accurate picture of the different types of growing media used, however the main lines that are grown in the UK are winter flowering pot plants (such as Cyclamen and Poinsettia) and virtually 100% of these are grown in peat based mixes (Holmes, 2004)

The majority of pot plants (including Chrysanthemum, Poinsettia and Campanula) are grown in a course, well drained compost mix (Shabot, 2005)

Argents Nursery in Essex currently grow a wide selection of herbaceous pot plants for retailers such as Homebase using a compost made up of four fifths peat and one fifth bark.  They used to mix the compost themselves but as labour costs have raised, it has become cheaper to buy the mix ready made (personal communication, 8 November 2005)

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  1. Current and past developments

Springfield Spray is a leading Chrysanthemum grower in the UK, who in the last three years by customer request has moved from using 100% peat to a mix of 70:30 peat: bark and they have found this to be very successful.  However, the retailers have slashed the price of the Pot Chrysanthemum by 30% over the same period of time (Growing Media Association, 2003) and growers such as Springfield are finding it difficult to absorb the extra cost incurred from using high quality bark in their growing media.  Using a lower quality and ...

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