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Selecting the Best Liner Size: OFA Short Course
By admin | July 18, 2007
The OFA Short Course wrapped up yesterday and I’d say it was a rousing success, for me anyway. I was able to visit with all the vendors that I wanted to and I attended most of the seminars I was interested in. Monday, I took in a seminar titled; Selecting the Best Liner Size. The emphasis on this presentation was on scheduling, profitability, and quality of different sized liners. As the head grower of a propagation facility that sells liners to other growers, I was extremely interested in this topic. The two speakers presenting this material were both extremely qualified in the subject matter and they did a great job presenting the material. Dr. Paul Fisher, from the University of Florida, has been working on this topic for a few years and I have taken in several of his presentations and followed his research closely. Brian Weesies is the Production Manager of Glass Corner Greenhouses which is an industry leader in liner production. Much of the information in the seminar was from research conducted by the Young Plant Research Center, the rest of the info was from trials at Glass Corner Greenhouses. Since I do not have permission to publish the information in the seminar, I’ll stick with giving my experiences on different liner sizes. At our greenhouse, we produced nearly all of our vegetative production with a 40mm ellepots. This translates to a 50 tray or liners that are roughly twice the size of a traditional 105 tray. We kept these liners in our propagation house for 6-7 weeks, under HID lights to give supplemental lighting in an effort to initiate flower buds on the lateral branches. For us, the benefit of a larger liner was tremendous. We were able to finish a 4 inch pot in 3 to 4 weeks with a 50 tray liner vs. 6-7 weeks with a regular 105 tray. Now the total crop time from sticking to shipping was nearly the same but we were able to get an extra turn in our finished greenhouses. So the real decision for us is, can we afford to have less plants per square foot in our propagation houses so that we can get an extra turn in our finished space. For us this is an easy decision, bigger liners are better, but if you are a grower buying in rooted youngplants, can you afford the extra cost of a larger liner. Again, I think this is an easy decision and floriculture professionals like Dr. Paul Fisher and David Weesies have the research to prove it.
Topics: Day to day |
August 1st, 2007 at 9:15 am
For your larger liners, how many cuttings were you sticking per cell? I have done 804’s 1004’s and 606’s usually at 2 plants per cell. The larger liners do take up more bench space initially than 105 trays, but I agree that you can turn around a larger product faster by not starting with such a small plug.
August 1st, 2007 at 11:51 am
Anna,
We usually stick one cutting per cell. It doesn’t pay to add additional cuttings especially if you cut them twice. You can however, do combinations within the same cell. Example, a tricolor calibrichoa for baskets, you can stick blue, red and yellow in the same cell. For items like bacopa, nemesia and diascia, we use 2 cuttings per cell but we do that in a 105 anyway.
It’s a tough decision sometimes to use a bigger liner in your prop house because your density goes down in your most expensive house to run so it costs more per liner. However the overall crop time ends up the same so when you can afford to grow a bigger liner size (like early spring when your prop house isn’t always fulling back up) then it pays to use a bigger liner and get an extra turn at the end of the year.