SMALL RADISH FOR LIGHT CULTURE: CHALLENGES AND PROSPECTS

Abstract

Intense light culture, the most impotent part of a regulated agroecosystem, makes it possible to produce high quality plant products all year round in any region of the world in close proximity to the consumer. It is most economically viable to use light culture for growing vegetables in the Far North, where there is an acute shortage of fresh vegetables and vitamins. Our studies of the range of different vegetable crops have shown that when using artificial lighting and low-volume cultivation technologies, many plant species and varieties have low productivity, low adaptability to the relevant conditions, and therefore unprofitable for mass production. To expand the range of vegetable products intended for cultivation in the light culture, it is necessary to do a massive screening of the varieties and hybrids of various crops available in the world assortment with the aim of selecting the best and also purposeful breeding of new forms and varieties maximally adapted to the appropriate cultivation technologies. The purpose of this work was to create new forms of small radish for light culture, having the necessary complex of economically valuable characters. The use of the previously developed methodology of predicting transgressions for economically valuable plant traits allowed us to obtain new promising forms of radish with using purposeful hybridization and subsequent stabilizing selection. Their characteristics are high productivity and early maturity (ripeness to harvesting for 21-25 days from seeding), the ability to produce marketable yield of roots in a small volume of root medium, resistance to bolting at higher temperatures. A number of the obtained forms also has a compact rosette of leaves and an almost glabrous leaf of the salad type. Marketable productivity of new forms of radish in intense light culture conditions reaches 5,5 kg/m2 (for hybrids F1) and 4 kg/m2 for stable lines, which is twice or more than the productivity of the parental cultivars and one and a half times more than the best in productivity cultivars that were tasted in light culture.