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Projects

Effect of Greenhouse Light Transmissivity and Plant Density on Cucumber Production

Status: Finished

Year: 2017

Project type Effect of Greenhouse Light Transmissivity and Plant Density on Cucumber Production

Background

In a greenhouse, a favorable climate is realized to have sunlight converted to fresh vegetable crops. In general, the more light a crop receives, the more product can be grown. Then, additional light will hardly lead to additional production and the detrimental effects of Estidamah 2 of 33 a higher light entrance become dominant. The detrimental effects of high light transmissivity are too high temperatures and/or a high water demand for cooling.

Experimental History

Seed Sowing: 8 March 2017
Transplanting: 26 March 2017
First Harvest: 10 April 2017
Harvesting Period: 10 April – 9 July (13 weeks)
Number of Harvests: 37

Goals

This project aims at finding the trade-off between using an insulating polycarbonate cover

that reduces the heat and light entrance and a highly transparent glass greenhouse.

The main factors studied are:

Two greenhouse types: a glass and a multi-wall polycarbonate covered greenhouse the glass greenhouse has an average transmissivity of 60% and the multi-wall polycarbonate greenhouse has a 35% average transmissivity
Two cucumber varieties: Khassib and Alfrid (Rijk Zwaan)
Two stem densities: 3.75 stems/m² (low density) and 5 stems/m² (high density)

Result overview

Low light transmitting greenhouse gave a 37% lower cucumber production than the high light-transmitting glass greenhouse.

Polycarbonate Greenhouse	Production (kg/m²)	St. deviation (4 plots)
Khassib low stem density	9.47	0.88
Khassib low stem density	10.22	0.59
Khassib high stem density	8.66	0.82
Alfrid low stem density	8.49	0.54

Polycarbonate Greenhouse	Production (kg/m²)	St. deviation (4 plots)
Khassib low stem density	14.50	0.63
Khassib high stem density	16.12	1.15
Alfrid low stem density	13.26	0.96
Alfrid high stem density	8.49	0.87

Low light-transmitting greenhouse used 9% less water for cooling, but as the production dropped more than the water consumption, the water use efficiency of the low light-transmitting greenhouse was less than the highly transparent glass greenhouse.

	From 8 April Till 9 July
	Clear Glass Greenhouse	Polycarbonate Greenhouse
Irrigation	321	256
Drain	78	58
Irri-drain	243	198
Cooling	476	458
Net water use	719 l/m²	656 l/m²
Yield	14.6 kg/m²	9.2 kg/m²
WUE	49 l/kg	72 l/kg

Recommendation

As long as the temperature can be well controlled (which is the case in the dry arid climate conditions in the Riyadh region) high light levels are no problem for cucumber
The variety Khassib gives a higher production than the variety Alfrid
Therefore, ensuring a high light transmissivity of the greenhouse (60%) gives a better water use efficiency than using an insulating low transmission greenhouse (35%).

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