The heating in our tunnels allows us to start taking plants out of the laboratory from the end of February. Our hydroponic system with early planting allows us to start harvesting over 20mm mini tubers from the end of May. This means our mini tubers are Physiological/Chronologically much older than mini tubers produced in any UK peat based mini tuber systems.
This can give us up to 8 weeks extra in seed age. The increase in stem/tuber numbers can between 20-30%.
The advantage of this system allows our mini tubers to:
- Emerge much quicker
- Have higher stem numbers
- Produce more tubers (up to 20-30% more)
- Reach mature plant virus resistance a lot quicker
- Carry some of these benefits into the following seed generation
The hydroponic system can give us over 20 tubers per plant compared to an average of 4 tubers in a peat based system. This allows us to be very competitively priced compared to peat based mini tuber production.