Screening And Effect Of Different Substrate On Vegetable Soilless Culture

Earthworms are one of the most important members of soil fauna in continental ecosystem. They are involved in the regulation of crushing and digesting organic matter, increasing soil fertility and maintaining soil structure stability, which are very important in the performance of soil ecosystem function. In recent years, continuous vegetable cropping and salinization disorder became the "bottleneck" on vegetables yield and quality. Under this condition, substrate culture has been considered an effective way to solve above problems. It has been demonstrated that peat and rock wool are the most used materials in substrate culture. However, although the peat materials are considered an ideal selection, it is limited due to the un-renewable characteristics; while for rock wool, the associated difficulty is how to recover the used residues which might lead secondary pollution. Therefore, it is imperative to choose appropriate materials to solve the above problems. In this study, six organic materials including peat soil (PS), earthworms dung (ED), fen manure (FM), cow muck (CM), spent mushroom (SM), boar dung (BD) in combination with inorganic slag, where the ratio of each inorganic to organic material was 3:2, were examined to evaluate their respective impacts of each formula on the yields and quality of Chinese chives, Pepper, Celery and Tomato's cultivation. The main results are as follows: (1) Adding earthworms improved the physical and chemical properties of substrates, and also improved the substrate water capacity, fertilizer retention ability and gas permeability. In addition, high contents of nutrients in earthworms dung met the requirement for the growth of Chinese chives, Pepper, Celery and Tomato. (2) Significantly different impacts of selected organic materials on the growth and products quality were obtained. For example, of these formulas, the highest yields of Chinese chives, Pepper, Celery and Tomato were obtained with the earthworm dung formula. In addition, the best quality of Chinese chives, Pepper, Celery and Tomato was also obtained with the earthworm dung formula. Furthermore, application of the mix of different manures provided better quality than single manure application. Overall, the formula of earthworm dung and slag with earthworms is recommended for soilless culture. This result is very important to select the appropriate organic material for substrate for Chinese chives, Pepper, Celery and Tomato cultivation.