Strawberry fields forever
A Palmerston North horticultural scientist’s life-long passion for strawberries has finally borne fruit as trials growing the summertime berry in winter prove successful.
Dr Mike Nichols used to work for Massey University as a researcher and lecturer. And although he retired 20 years ago, he still consults on scientific issues, both with the university and internationally.
Nichols said he’d returned to attempts to grow strawberries out of season time and again throughout his 59-year scientific career – he’d made his first attempt as a child living in England.
Now, the scientist has not only succeeded, but he’s managed to produce double the industry average yield with his trial crops.
‘‘I wasn’t quite a teenager yet when I first attempted it. I tried to grow some strawberries on my mother’s kitchen windowsill over the English winter. It didn’t go very well,’’ Nichols said.
Already a keen horticulturalist, the failure of his childhood experiment sparked a life-long curiosity about whether it could be done.
In fact, strawberries were the subject of the first research project of his career in 1959 – and although he ended up specialising in vegetables, he kept cultivating strawberries as a hobby.
Then in 2000 he was involved in a test project that attempted to grow strawberries over winter in greenhouses and hydroponically for Turners and Growers.
It didn’t produce great results, but did renew his interest in his old quest and left him overflowing with ideas on how it could be done better.
Eighteen months ago, Nichols and one of his former graduate students leased a couple of heated greenhouses from Massey University and started trialling the ideas he’s been honing since then.
Strawberries are a summer fruit, so in New Zealand they’re mostly grown between October and Christmas, Nichols said.
During winter the fruit has to be air-freighted from California or Australia, which makes them more expensive and less fresh – and raises biosecurity issues, such as fruit fly infestation.
So, Nichols set out to test how well four different strawberry varieties grew in each month – using a range of techniques to find the best method for each season.
Commercial growers, using the industry standard variety of strawberry, harvest 60 tonnes a hectare on average from their fields in summer.
Nichols’ more successful trials produced double that. He believes they could potentially reach a yield of 200 tonnes a hectare year round, with relatively small seasonal variation.
Nichols said they’d proven it could be done, but whether their techniques could be scaled up was still up in the air. ‘‘It works, but what the economics of it look like is another matter, and one that’s outside my expertise.’’