Horticulture & Business Management: Learning how to be a grower

Currently, strawberries and cucumbers are quite trending crops. So it’s no wonder that the students decided to work on that. “We started at the end of August,” says Nicole Kuleshova, one of the students partaking in the project. “The main goal has always been to keep the crop healthy. It may sound easy, but it was a big change for us. We have always had support from teachers and other greenhouse people. We have never been alone in that kind of work. This year, it was different because we had to make cultivation decisions ourselves, which is even more challenging when you are doing that in a big, international group.”

“It was a challenge to get our plan going,” says Sonia Carmen Morar, another student from the project. “You don’t only have to be knowledgeable about the crop, but you also have to know how to work with others. We started having meetings, making an agenda, so that everyone knew what was going on.”

For the cucumber cultivation, the students decided to go for a wire crop. “Few growers are doing that,” Nicole points out. “On top of that, the time of the year we started the project is unusual for both cucumber and strawberry cultivation. So, we had to take that into account too.”

Maintaining a balanced climate has indeed been particularly tricky for the group of students. “We reached a healthy climate balance just a couple of weeks ago,” she says. “We had very unusual weather, in September through October. We had very warm and sunny days, and then these got suddenly much shorter. That was a problem for pests and pathogens, we struggled quite a bit with pests and diseases, especially botrytis. But at this point, all is good.” The problem with such pathogens, however, wasn’t caused by the unusual weather only. “Our air treatment stopped working at one point,” Sonia points out. “When it failed, we saw that the relative humidity went too high, and that’s when we go the diseases. Some problems were also caused because some plants were not cut properly, which made it easier for fungi to show up. So, we also focused a lot on the correct handling, and now things are going alright.”