Acclimatization of ornamental pineapple micropropagated plants in different substrate volumes.


The ornamental pineapple (Ananas comosus var. erectifolius (L. B. Smith) Coppens e Leal) is a plant that produces “flowers” of rare beauty, appreciated by consumers of the whole world. Nowadays, this ornamental species occupies the second position in the ranking of flowers and ornamental plants exports of the Ceará State. Due to the high market demand, the plants are already produced in commercial scale through the micropropagation, a technique of the tissue culture with five important stages. One of them, the acclimatization, is a critical phase because it answers for the high death rate and low growth rates of the plants. This happens for lack of technical and scientific information about the cultivation in this stage. Therefore, in order to minimize this problem and fill out the existent gap with important information about the appropriate culture management, the objective of this work was to evaluate the effects of different substrate volumes in the acclimatization of ornamental pineapple micropropagated plants. The research was carried out in a greenhouse of the Embrapa Tropical Agroindustry located in Fortaleza, Ceará State (3º44' S and 38º33' W). The seedlings were cultivated in the green coir dust substrate with wormcompost (3:1) and they were irrigated with a 3 mm water level twice a day. The tested agronomic variables were the number of leaves, the largest width of the 3rd leaf and the largest diameter of the rosette, at 83 days after the transplant, and root and shoot fresh/ dry masses. The experimental design was a randomized block with 4 treatments and 5 repetitions for the variables related to foliar development, and with 4 treatments and 4 repetitions for the variables related to production of plant mass. The treatments consisted of: 300 cm3 pots; 180 cm3 pots; tray StyrofoamTM of 40 cm3·cell-1 and tray StyrofoamTM of 30 cm3·cell-1. Each one of all repetitions comprised 8 plants. Results evidenced the best development of ornamental pineapple micropropagated plants of when they were cultivated in 180 cm3 pots.