Net cover system under banana cultivation facilities

Banana is one of the most important tropical fruits that commercially cultivated among tropical fruits in Turkey. Banana normally cultivated in open field under tropical conditions is grown both open field and greenhouse under subtropical conditions like Turkey. Cultivation places are reached the end of limitation about banana which can only be grown some limited place of Mediterranean region of Turkey reflecting microclimatic conditions. Because of this reason, facultative cultivation techniques and greenhouse production should be increased in order to improve banana production of Turkey. There are significant increases in terms of greenhouse production territory approaching the end of limitation in Turkey during the last years. For this reason, alternative systems instead of using greenhouse should be developed especially for rugged terrain. In the banana production, plastic is used as a covering system in Turkey. The use of plastic causes a disadvantage about using rain-water. In consequence, it is aimed in this planned study that banana production under the net covering system providing use of rain-water is comparing with open field production in the rugged terrain which is not available to construct greenhouse. This experiment was conducted in Gazipasa, Antalya locally in Yakacik between 2015 and 2016. Dwarf Cavendish cultivar was preferred as plant material. Galvanized iron and monofilament white weaving net were used as construction material and covering system, respectively. In addition to climatic and some yield parameters, morphologic characteristics of plants (stem round, stem length, number of leaves, stem round of cluster) yield, pomological characteristics of pre-harvest and postharvest fruits were comparatively determined with regard to open field and net covering system. Research findings demonstrated that temperature values were higher under the net covering system whereas the values of relative moisture were lower when we consider all months. On the contrary to atmospheric moisture, soil moisture recorded at the end of vegetation period was higher under the net covering system than open field growing. Also, chlorophyll content detected on the leaves was higher under the net covering system, however; light values regarding to photometric, quantum and pyranometric were detected lower. Moreover, it is observed that damage from wind was minimum and substantial part of morphological characteristics gave good results under the net covering system. In addition to that it was resulted that the number of comb and weight of clusters directly affecting the yield were higher under the net covering system than open field growing. Furthermore, it was determined that fruit physical characteristics (the values of finger weight, finger around and finger length) were higher under the net covering. As a result of this study, although 4.02 ton was harvested from one decare in open field growing, 4.49 ton was produced from one decare in the net covering system.