A Little Catch Up Ball ...

A friend of mine sent me a very nice email saying that he was worried about me since there had been no update on the gardens since September 12th. My only excuse is that I've been very busy. However in the interim I've topped off the system at least 3 times putting in two cups of concentrate twice and one and a half cups just today when I topped it off. I may have missed a topoff here since that would be 9 days (but that sounds about right, an average of 3 days between topping off).

I've also been taking a large number of tomatoes off both the garden and the float system every couple of days. The counter never gets empty, just more and more tomatoes ... I'm getting really tomatoed out since Jessica has abandoned eating them, the challenge is all mine even though I've given some to the neighbors.

As I take them I keep a record, weighing each tomato. But I'm way behind in posting the data. I used to just post it to a spread sheet (I should go back to that). But I'll get around to catching up in a few days.

Pictures and Such ...

Well here the counter is covered with tomatoes. I'm eating them as fast as I can and they are still rolling in even it the density is a bit slower than in the past. Probably only another few weeks of tomato harvesting left.

This is what the garden looks like. You can see that it has a lot of tomatoes still coming. There are something like fourteen tomato plants in the garden and frankly they've been prolific but not as nice as the hydroponics tomatoes. For some reason a lot of garden tomatoes seem to be a little hollow. I'm guessing it is some kind of deficiency. They also have not tended to turn red as uniformly as as the float system tomatoes.

Here are two views of the float system. In the first you can see the floats and the pool and get the picture of how they just sort of fell over and were all skewed to one side by the rains and wind. I really think the system has been terrific, but it certainly doesn't look like much right now. I'm still taking a lot of tomatoes off it but you have to hunt them up by picking through the leaves.

Topped Off and Ratty ...

Well I've taken a ton more tomatoes off the garden and the float system. Today I topped it off again driving it down to CF=12 and adding two cups of concentrate to bring it up theoretically to 24. Have not checked however. I really have to update the harvest statistics and put up pictures. Both systems are starting to look a little ratty. It's the end of the season or getting close to it. The float system supports pushed over so the plants are mostly on the ground.

We even got a volunteer out in the front of the house and I picked five little tomatoes off that fellow this afternoon. They are small Dona type tomatoes but they looked good even though it's been completely neglected. I'll try to remember to take pictures soon so that what a ratty system looks like can be seen. I've really been neglecting the garden system too. So the result has been that the tomatoes from the float system have tended to be better since the garden has received no fertilizer and no watering but natural rain of late.