Article and images by Shinsuke Agehara
Plant Physiologist Dr. Shinsuke Agehara and his research team at University of Florida completed the first-year field evaluation of strawberry plug transplants in Florida. This experiment was conducted at Gulf Coast Research and Education Center in Balm, FL.
In the field experiment, we used two short-day cultivars that are commonly grown in Florida, ‘Florida127’ (Sweet Sensation®) and ‘Florida Brilliance’. For each cultivar, we had three transplant treatments, including unchilled and chilled plug transplants, as well as bare-root transplants as control. Plug transplants were sourced from Dr. Mark Hoffmann’s team at NCSU and shipped overnight to Florida, whereas bare-root transplants were sourced from a commercial nursery in California and
shipped by a refrigerated truck.
For strawberry growers in Florida, the main desirable effect of using plug transplants compared to bare-root transplants is to increase early season yield by accelerating establishment growth, which is economically important because of high premium prices associated with fruit earliness. In this study, plug transplants established quicker and maintained greater canopy growth than bare-root transplants throughout the growing season. These differences, however, did not result in increased early season (November–December) yield. On the contrary, there was a tendency that plug transplants produced higher yield than bare-root transplants in the late season (January–February). In ‘Florida127’, relatively lower yield of bare-root transplants may be due partly to greater damage by Phytophthora crown rot. Overall, chilling had no significant effect on the performance of plug transplants.
Traditionally, the performance of plug transplants is affected largely by weather conditions. We will repeat this study in the 2024-25 season to obtain conclusive data and fully evaluate the potential benefits of plug transplants for winter strawberry production in Florida.
transplant type.
