Commercial seedling production and vegetable soilless cultivation are becoming common techniques among vegetable growers around the world. Several organic materials as peat, wood residue, pine bark, rice husk, or inorganic materials as sand, volcanic rocks, perlite, rockwool have been used alone or in mixture with others. Green coconut shells are becoming a major problem for the litter public service in many cities in Brazil, due to the large amount of material and its slow decomposition process. Recently, fibers extracted from coconut shells are being used as substrate. The coconut shells for the substrate production need to be cut, disintegrated in fibers, washed, dried and ground. For seedling production the manufactured coconut fiber substrate needs to be composted. The composting process is not necessary for flowers and vegetable soilless cultivation, but nutrients should be added in pre-plant or by fertigation. Tomatoes cultivated on coconut fiber substrate produced 13,2 kg m-2 of marketable fruits (three years average). This production was about 7,3% more than the production on sawdust (12,3 kg m-2).
soilless cultivation; fertigation
