New techniques to improve yields of garlic and onion
Garlic is native to central Asia, its edible portion or bulb consists of cloves, called garlic seed, which are also used to propagate it.
These garlic seed cloves can’t be planted immediately after harvesting because garlic needs a period of latency or dormancy before resuming growth. This latency varies depending on the kind of variety used and storage temperatures. As such, short dormancy varieties have low returns and vice versa.
Dormancy is considered to be given by substances that promote sprouting (sprouting hormones) and dormancy promoting substances (sprouting inhibitors). Dormancy can be broken with the cold treatment given to garlic before planting it.
Daniel Pini, agricultural engineer and technical representative of Cosmoflor, explained to Suplemento Verde that, “they had managed to break this dormancy and standardize the sprouting of the garlic seeds with the immersion treatment of the commercial product Maxi Grow and Rootex.
Rootex aims at promoting a higher quality root system to increase the crop’s recovery of fertilizers, accelerating the plant’s establishment (a strong start) with greater uniformity and increasing the productive potential.”
The professional also said that, “garlic’s growth is slow when it begins its vegetative activity, because the plant needs cold weather, and that it requires temperatures between 8 and 20°C at night and between 13 and 24°C during the day to grow vigorously.
The low temperatures the plant receives in the period before bulbing determine the beginning of vegetative growth which obviously will affect yields. With temperatures of 0°C the plant is no longer able to take nutrients from the soil and remains in a state of dormancy until temperatures rise. That is why we need to stimulate plant growth during this period with Maxi Grow and Humifert."
Humifertes is a complete foliar nutrient enriched with humic acids, a natural substance that helps the absorption of foliar applied nutrients contributing to the growth, ensuring a good supply of food giving producers the opportunity of obtaining better yields and quality from the bulbs.
Heavier seeds should be used since these will create larger bulbs. The bulb formation stage begins when the average soil temperature is around 18 and 20°C and they exceed a day’s time period that is different for each variety. There are better emissions of bulbs on long days with high temperatures than in short days with low temperatures.
"Let’s not forget that the higher vegetative expression a plant has, the more likely we are to get quality bulbs and weight which are so precious in this demanding market," said Daniel Pini.
Source: Diariodecuyo
