Carnation Production Using Soilless Culture Technique

Flowers are prized as objects of great beauty and diversity, and are commercially valuable and highly perishable. Carnation is one of the most popular cut flowers in the world and the highest economic importance in the floriculture industry. Nevertheless, Carnation is very susceptible to soil-borne diseases, unless soil-borne diseases are controlled; plant growing becomes a hazard operation filled with risk. Usually methyl bromide is used as soil fumigator for Carnation production under greenhouses,but methyl bromide will not be permitted after few years in Egypt and other countries because it is extremely toxic and environmental harmful. For that, this work focused on using soilless culture technique for producing Carnations instead of using soil, so there is no need for using methyl bromide or any other soil fumigators, also our work aimed to determine the most economic soilless culture systems for producing Carnations. This is done by testing five different soilless systems (aeroponics, hydroponics, 3 substrate systems) for producing carnation under two cultivation densities, and each system have been evaluated regarding the production, flower quality and economic assessment.