Nursery Selection for High Early Fruit Yield in Subtropical Strawberries

Abstract

Development of new strawberry cultivars for winter fruit production in Florida entails growing of hybrid seedlings in a nursery in the summer of the first year for runner plant production. Two runner plants are taken from each seedling and planted in the fruiting field in the fall. An experiment was conducted to see if it is possible to predict which genotypes in the nursery will have the highest early season fruit yield. Seedlings from 24 families from a 6 × 4 factorial mating design were grown in a nursery. From each family, daughter plants of 20 seedlings with the highest vigor and 20 randomly picked seedlings were then evaluated in the fruiting field. Plants from selected (high-vigor) seedlings were more vigorous, but had fewer crowns and runners, than unselected plants. More inflorescences were counted in selected plants than in unselected plants during the second week of January. This could account for higher early yield (yield at the end of January) and total yield (yield at the end of March) in selected than in unselected plants.