EDIBLES / 04
THE NEW CHALLENGES OF THE ‘MALLING
CENTENARY’ STRAWBERRY VARIETY
In the first of two articles, Dr. Eamonn Kehoe, Teagasc Soft Fruit Specialist, discusses some of the research findings from the work carried out on ‘Malling Centenary’ over the last few years. The research was conducted in the state of the art research glasshouse unit in Teagasc Ashtown, Dublin WHY THIS STRAWBERRY VARIETY? ‘Malling Centenary’ is currently the most popular strawberry variety on the Irish market. It has replaced the Dutch strawberry variety ‘Elsanta’ which was the mainstay of Irish strawberry production for over 40 years. The fruit quality of ‘Malling Centenary’ has been described as superb. Whilst the yields of the variety are lower than those of ‘Elsanta’, the variety compensates for this with increased fruit harvesting speeds and better fruit quality. ‘Malling Centenary’ is categorised as a ‘June-bearing’ strawberry, or in scientific parlance, a ‘short day’ (SD) plant; these plants initiate flower buds in short days. The day length needed for such initiation is not fixed, but is modulated by temperature. The lower the temperature, within limits, the fewer the days needed. These ‘June-bearers’ fruit naturally in June, hence the name, and are the most popular varieties among commercial growers. They are the result of decades of breeding for attributes such as productivity, size, flavour, and disease resistance. NEW RESEARCH OBJECTIVES Initially, very little was known about this new strawberry variety. The research described here focused primarily on establishing a growing system for the crop grown in a heated glasshouse unit.
10
‘THE YIELD AND QUALITY OF THE ‘MALLING CENTENARY’ CROP WAS EXCELLENT’
The first trial focused on developing the optimal nutrition regime for this new variety. Although the ‘Centenary’ is a SD plant, its flowering characteristics are quite different from those of a typical SD plant. Some of the plant's genetic makeup includes crosses from the east coast of the United States and these genes may be switched on in certain environmental conditions. In fact, when the variety was first grown here several Irish growers observed an unusual feature of this new variety. When grown over a season in a heated glasshouse it cropped continually, from the spring to the early autumn. This is highly unusual for a ‘June bearing’ (short day) strawberry variety. We observed the same phenomenon in our trial. SUCCESSFUL CROP PRODUCTION WITH LOWER INPUTS High crop yields and good fruit quality, with as few crop inputs as possible, are the goals of successful production systems, saving money for the grower and simultaneously resulting in considerable environmental benefits. We grew one crop of ‘Malling Centenary’ over two growing seasons. The plants were planted in early 2018 into a heated glasshouse unit. The crop was fed with a feed a low electrical conductivity (EC) of 1.0dSm-1 or with a standard feed with
HORTICULTURECONNECTED / www.horticultureconnected.ie / Spring 2021
