Articles
THE INFLUENCE OF COLD TREATMENTS ON THE UNIFORMITY OF CAULIFLOWER CURD INITIATION AND MATURITY
On average in the UK the cost of harvesting accounts for 43% of total production costs and there is a need to improve the uniformity of time of maturity of the crop in order to reduce harvesting costs.
The cold treatment of plants before transplanting has previously been shown to reduce the spread in time of curd maturity and it is likely that this occurs by reducing the spread in time of curd initiation.
However the effect of cold treatments has been slightly inconsistent from one experiment to another.
Data are presented here to illustrate the effects of cold treatments on the spreads of curd initiation and curd maturity of varieties of widely different seasons of maturity, in an attempt to determine the cause of this variable response.
The effect of cold treatments on the spreads of curd initiation and maturity varied according to variety, plant age, duration and degree of cold.
In all varieties the numbers of leaves and leaf initials on plants when cold treated were considerably fewer than the final number of leaves.
Effects on curd initiation were closely related to those on curd maturity, confirming that the spread of curd initiation may be used as an estimate of the spread of curd maturity.
The data suggest that each variety gives a more synchronous curd initiation in response to cold treatment only at a specific growth stage, which can be defined in terms of leaf number and that the required number of leaves may vary considerably from one variety to another.
Such a hypothesis could account for the variable response to cold treatment occurring as a result of differences in genotype, plant age, duration and degree of cold.