Strawberry Transplant Propagation in Elevated Horizontal Troughs

Commercial strawberry cultivars are vegetatively propagated in field nurseries. Mother plants produce daughter plants on stolons in response to long photoperiods and high temperatures. The daughter plants are primarily removed from the field as a bare-root transplant. These bare-root transplants can be extremely stressed in this digging process, resulting in plant variability and pathogen infestation. A strawberry transplant production system has been developed that uses micropropagated disease free mother plants in elevated horizontal culture. The mother plants are grown in suspended plastic troughs (10-cm width by 10-cm depth) with a soilless medium consisting of vermiculite and perlite. The mother plants are subfertigated via drip tubing to avoid leaf wetness. Stolons produced by the mother plants hang over the trough and continue to grow down toward the ground. The stolon tips, are harvested and rooted in plug trays. This study compared proliferation rates of several strawberry cultivars. The benefits of the elevated system were: disease-free plants, high-density daughter plant production, all the runners could be removed at one time and separated for propagation, and the daughter plants had active root tips that established quickly.