Preparing Our Coconut Fibre Substrate, To Transplant Our Tomatoes Plants With The Interns.

almost 2 years ago

Hello Hivers!!
Welcome to my blog.!!

So, for our practical with the interns this week, we are to transplant or tomato that has been in our nursery for almost 4 weeks now and it is ready to be transplanted.

This time we ain’t going to plant the tomato on soil, we are going “Soilless”.

The advent of science and technology into agriculture have seen the introduction of different types of farming methods that can be employed to get good crop production.

Some Of These Farming Techniques Include ;

Hydroponics

Source

Here plant are just grown with water that passes through a channel to supply the root zone of the plant with adequate nutrient through liquid fertilizers.

Aeroponics

Source

Here plants are grown in a suspended platform and the nutrients is been applied to the plant through most or vapour. The liquid fertilizer is converted to mist and used to feed the root zones of the plant.

Etc.

Soilles farming which is one of the new inventions is a farming practice which involves the planting of crops without soil.

Over the years I have been thought that soil is were plants grow, but now I have come to understood that soil is a medium which plant take up nutrient and get anchor to grow.

Which means that this medium “soil” can be substituted for something else, if it can provide these properties the soil provides for the plant.

Using coconut fiber as a substrate to grow our tomatoes possess these properties and can substitute the use of soil for planting our tomatoes. Using coconut fibre has it own benefits and disadvantages.

Some of the Benefits Includes;

• It water retention capacity is higher that soil, which means it can hold adequate moisture longer that soil.

• It makes the nutrient readily available for the plants roots to take up.

• It gives good airation to the roots of the plant

• Doesn’t store up too much water, the excess water drains out

• It does not encourage weed growth other than what you planted

• Save space to plant more crops as you will be planting in bags.

Some Of The Disadvantages Are

• The coconut fiber not easy to come by

• Can be expensive to get.

How We Prepared Our Coconut Fibre.

The coconut fibre is gotten from the mesocarp of the coconut,(the husk) and then we soaked them in water so it will be soft and shredded them bit by bit to get both the coconut fibre and the coconut peat.

We then mixed equal part of poultry manure with equal part of the coconut fibre and bagged them for transplanting..

The coconut fibre dose not have nutrients on its own, so nutrient must be applied either in a liquid form or solid form.