Hedon Salads
T: 01430 441552Hedon Salads Ltd
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Lit Cucumbers
Hedon now boasts the largest lit cucumber crop in Europe. Growing year round has turned the company’s production systems upside down. “It is definitely not for the feint hearted, the changes are on a par with moving from soil to rockwool,” says Tom Salmon, managing director.
With a ready supply of cheap electricity from the on-site 10 megawatt CHP facility, the Burstwick site was chosen. After an initial small-scale trial in a two-acre block, Hedon took a giant step converting 80,000m2 to year round production.
The original glasshouse required major structural alterations. Measuring just 2.8 m from floor to gutter, the Dutch company Van Dool was employed to raise it by two metres and fit a new ventilation system.
With efficiency in mind, the crop is lit using 600 watt lamps. Using internal reflectors these lamps are designed to significantly reduce light loss caused by the accumulation of dust or loss of anodizing which can effect lamps with external reflectors.
Using supplementary lighting, Hedon aim to ensure the cucumber crop receives a minimum of 10,000 lux for up to 16 hours a day, 365 days a year. This necessitates lighting the crop, even in the height of summer.
As expected the first year proved to be a steep learning curve. According to Tom Salmon, most significantly it demonstrated that the standard umbrella system would not deliver sufficient yield benefits.
Having closely observed the high wire approach being employed in the year round cucumber production project at Stockbridge Technology Centre (STC), the directors decided to closely mirror their techniques. Converting to a high wire system, more usually seen in tomatoes, created fundamental changes to the crop management and control of labour.
According to Tom Salmon, producing a large commercial crop, as opposed to 1,000m2 at STC, has magnified certain problems - in particular labour skills issues.
With a high wire system, the crop requires twisting, deleafing, training and layering to a strict schedule, he explains. Growing at twice the speed of a tomato crop, cucumber plants can add as many as seven new nodes a week. To manage the crop, Hedon has had to restructure its division of labour. Separating staff to carry out specific functions rather than working an area and carrying out all tasks.
As well as major investment in lights and in modernizing the glasshouse, significant capital investment has been needed in other areas including harvesting trolleys and waste management. De-leafing twice a week creates large volumes of crop waste to be tidied up and removed. To deal with the waste, Hedon has developed a shredding and composting process with the end product being used by local farmers.
While STC has shown it is academically possible to achieve yields exceeding 300 cucumber m2 per year, Tom Salmon believes in a large-scale commercial situation yields of 220 are more realistic. He is pleased with progress and confident the company is well on track to hit its target.