Vertical vegetable growing: creating tomato varieties for multi-tiered hydroponic installations

Abstract

Abstract The relevance of vertical vegetable growing is due to the need to ensure an uninterrupted supply of food and reduce the cost of food production in terms of moving the majority of the population of the Earth into urban space. The market of vertical vegetable growing can be characterized as capacious and fast-growing. In the Russian Federation, this market is still developing. The main vegetable crops are not represented in it. The purpose of the study was to create tomato varieties for the vertical vegetable growing (multi-tiered hydroponic plants). For this purpose, a new approach to the breeding process was necessary, in which the variety would be considered as an element of the technological chain. A collection of 692 tomato samples served as our research material. Research methods included the following: creating a model of a new form of tomato for multi-tiered hydroponic structures; analyzing the genetic basis of the characteristic “short stature” in Solanum lycopersicum L.; conducting an individual selection from sporophyte variety populations; testing selected samples in a multi-tiered narrow-rack hydroponics installation; selecting the most large-fruited and productive samples; transferring new varieties to the State Variety Testing (GSI), and analyzing the economic efficiency of cultivating new varieties on multi-tiered hydroponic installation. As a result, in the Federal Scientific Center for Vegetable Growing, the first varieties of tomato vertical vegetables such as “Natasha” (Patent of the Russian Federation No. 9060) and “Timosha” (Patent of the Russian Federation No. 9059) were obtained. Our analysis of the economic efficiency of tomato cultivation on multi-tiered narrow-rack hydroponics demonstrated the convincing advantages of such a method of tomato cultivation as compared to the traditional cultivation method.