Application of Subirrigation Using Capillary Wick System to Pot Production

Alternative subirrigation way, capillary wick system (CWS) was tested to reduce labor cost, waste water, contamination of ground water, and use of fungicide compared to overhead irrigation system (OIS). CWS helped reduce remarkably the working hours for watering from 4 hours in OSI to just 5 minutes. Labor cost was saved 98% in CWS compared to OIS. By the physical characteristics of various growing media, 1 coconut coir＋2 perlite (v/v) mixture was selected because it had an ideal distribution of three phase, e.g. 1 solid: 1 liquid: 2 gas phase. Medium mixture containing scoria had so high bulk and particle density to hurt root. In bark-containing medium, the liquid phase and the percent saturation of liquid phase with time elapsed was lower than that of other mixture. It meant that the mixture contained very low level of water. Application of CWS for cyclamen pot production played an important role in reducing the incident of fusarium wilt symptom from 18% in conventional over watering system to 4%. Cyclamen pot irrigated by capillary wick had shorter petiole and more leaves than those by overhead watering. As a result, this system was highly beneficial to get uniform pot products with high quality. It improved water and nutrient solution efficiency relative to conventional overhead irrigation system (OIS).