Assessing quality of plant raising media for organic systems

Summary

Good quality transplants are vital to growers for a number of reasons. Their ability to better tolerate pest, disease and weed problems and their capacity to make better use of newly incorporated green manures (compared to direct drilling) make them all the more so in organic systems. The availability of high quality growing media is essential to producing healthy vigorous plants, but the organic standards restrict the choice of products available and many growers do not feel they have sufficient information to base their choices. OCW, with support from Farming Connect, coordinated a project to assess the certified products and looked at a green waste based product under development to help address this problem.
Growers were supplied with samples of certified products (details provided in the table below) and were asked to test them on range of crops. In order to support this work, scientifically robust trials were carried out by a plant raising specialist on cabbage leek and lettuce.