Remediation Of Protected Cucumber Continuous Cropping Obstacle By Microbiological Soil Amendments

Cucumber is one of the most common consumable fruit vegetables in China, and protected cultivation is almost exclusively used for its production. One of the most important measures to solve continuous cropping obstacles is using soil amendments. With the accumulation of planting years, one major problem is the continuous cropping obstacles. Thus, we will focus on greenhouse soil with different planting years, to study the relationship between the soil salinity accumulating and planting years. After treating continuous cucumber cropping soil with seven different microbiology soil amendments, we compared the physical and chemical properties of soil, microbe level, growth rate, plant disease, productivity and quality with controls. The results are summarized as follows: The accumulation of major salts is proportional to the planting years. After four years, the overall salt concentration increases by 62.3% compared with the first year greenhouse soil. To be more specific, for greenhouse soil over 2 years, the nitrate concentration is 3.2-3.5 folds of the first year soil, while calcium concentration is 2.4-3.5 folds. With soil improvement agents, the physical and chemical properties of greenhouse soil has been greatly improved, with significant decrease in EC value as high as 54.5%; compared with controls, they can also decelerate nitrate accumulation, with a 11.4%-84.3% increase in microbe concentration in later stage of cucumber growth.Microbe-based soil improvement agents can greatly improve the cucumber growth, with an average of 15.4% increase in plant height, an average of 8.74% increase in productivity, 16.1%-44.8% increase in soluble protein concentration, and a maximum of 29.3% increase in VC concentration. They can also decelerate the blight rate, with a significant decrease in infectious rate between 27.9% and 41.5% in later stage of cucumber growth.The results showed that microbiological soil amendments have obviously efficient for lightening soil secondary salinization. Plant Fusarium wilt,nitrate-nitrogen in soil and EC value are decreased obviously. Cucumber yields and quality are higher. Nitrate in cucumber is significantly lower and the content of VC is much higher than the control. However, different microbiological soil amendment has different effects. The microbiological soil amendment from Chuangbo has an obvious advantage especially.