The Season's End

Sooner or later you end the season and we've had a couple of overnight cold snaps and the garden in the ground, only the second I've done is quite a few years, is now history. Putting down newspaper and straw kept the weeds down but the garden was plagued by bugs and grubs and things that generally make tomatoes unappetizing although I'm a master at cutting out the bad parts. I've been too lazy to do the final update and roll up the statistics so maybe I'll do that later.

Right now, this year's experience has made me appreciate hydroponics all the more.  I never had grubs and bugs in a hydroponics system like I did in the ground.  I suppose I could have sprayed or something.  Not sure what would have worked.  Overall I had more tomatoes than I knew what to do with.  Jessica said that next year I should just do one tube (seven plants) and that would produce more tomatoes than we'd know what to do with and not be a very difficult system to set up and maintain.  That's definitely a thought.  A one tube NFT system would be fun and easy, so maybe that's what I'll do.  I certainly don't need the kind of production I get off a six tube system and the six tube system is a bit of a pain to set up.  It's not really hard except for the overheads.  The one problem with a one tube system is that I'll probably have to guy-wire the overhead support system since it will just be a single inverted "U" structure which will have no lateral stability unless it is guyed.