Winter Setting In

The Christmas season is upon us. Winter is setting in and it has started to be cold enough to shift from the light jacket and sweater I usually wear in the Fall to the heavy coat and sweater I wear when Winter really sets in. I suppose formally I have another week or so to wait.

Summer was disappointing on the tomato front. Had a fair number of tomatoes but even the best producers didn't produce anything like I'm used to from my NFT systems. So the next question is whether I can come up with a nice little NFT system that doesn't require a lot of busy work?

The systems that use 10' long sections of PVC pipe are big and a bit cumbersome in the space they take. I'd like to come up with something smaller but still productive. Maybe a small system made from shorter runs. I was thinking that a diamond shaped system might be just the ticket. It might even be mounted on the tank or over the tank. Maybe support eight plants.

The system would be strong and fairly self-contained. I could feed from one corner and deliver back to the tank from the opposite diagonal corner. Needs more thought of course, but looks like it might be fun.

Hydroponics In Space

SEE HERE For long term habitation in space it will be essential to grow your own food and recycle just about everything, especially water. The sheer difficulty of creating a closed cycle system will I think deter long term habitats in space until the technology can be perfected. Hydroponics is likely to be an important part of the ecology of a long term space colony. One would expect that such a colony's eco-system would be quite fragile. A significant blight would destroy the harvest and likely disrupt the ability of the habitat to exist. Don't expect to see long duration space travel until these kinds of problems are solved.

Need a Scale

I like to keep track of my tomatoes and my diet, so I use one of these attractive and relatively inexpensive kitchen scales which use piezo-electric crystal stress sensors to make their determination of weight. I'm really impressed with them since the two I have are so reliable and consistent. You can take the thing you are weighing off and on and it always reads the same which is one of the marks of a good measurement system.

I use the scales to weigh both tomatoes and food. I'm on a diet that is really fairly simple — shift food intake from 100 calorie per ounce food to 5 calorie per ounce food and eat all you want. I've dropped 45 pounds since May which isn't too bad. I started at 272 and I was 227 this morning. My long term goal is 170 so I still have a long way to go. If anyone is interested I'll say more.

The tomato is a perfect fit into this diet since tomatoes are nominally five calories per ounce. I let the food consumption range up to about 20 calories per ounce (grapes) before I get a little stingy with myself. You need a handy little digital scale if you're going to do this kind of diet since you have to measure how much things weigh or guess, but measuring is better.

I exchanged links with Joseph Wright at www.digitalkitchenscale.org so you'd have an easy link to go look at these interesting little scales. The growing season is about done and now it's into the eating of the last red ones and the waiting for the green ones to turn read or enter the fried green tomatoes experiment.

The Last Hurrah ...

This is what the tomatoes on the deck looked like a couple of days ago as October weather slowly turned from mild to colder. We have not had the frost yet that will terminate the growing season but the tomato plants are all but dormant in the cool days and colder nights.

It seems time for a recap. Summer 2009 was not a good experience. The total yield was a meager 189 tomatoes (sounds like a lot but most were cherries or small varieties. The total weight from the plants was only 518.75 ounces. That doesn't count the many green tomatoes which are still on the vines, but it is the ones that ripened and are being consumed by the Lord and Lady of the manor.

The summary is: 1) the wick systems started off well but hit a brick wall composed of disease and sudden failure to draw nutrient. A variety of factors may be implicated and I'm not sure of the relative likelihood of any of them. 1.1) system may have become so nutrient imbalanced that it the plants could not continue to proper. I don't have any way to determine that. The total nutrient conductivity was in the 20-24 cf range which is fine. 1.2) lack of oxygenation ... I didn't oxygenate the wick systems. The early prospering however makes me think that may not be the reason. 1.3) a good fraction of the plants expressed relatively severe plant diseases, but some seemed rather resistant, so that is also a factor.

My rule of thumb for plants is about 10 pounds of tomatoes per plant and with only 32 pounds of tomatoes from quite a large number of plants this season was a disaster. The system that did best was the deck system which was just potting soil planters which were watered and occasionally fertilized with mostly Miracle Grow which one of my correspondents pointed out is not a hydroponic nutrient, but then these pot systems were not hydroponic. The second set of plants were just set into Virginia clay otherwise they did fairly well, but also had disease problems. The deck system has some disease problems as well.

On the whole this was a season that was severely limited by plant disease. In fact I've never seen some of the problems with tomato plants that I saw this year. I'm going to look through some of the sites which have pictures of various tomatoe blights and diseases and see if I can classify some of the problems I had.

I enjoy even the bad years because I learn a lot. What I mostly learned this year is to go back to NFT next year, even if the system is only a small one. These systems were low yielding and just as much trouble as the NFT systems have ever been.

Stewardship: You Get Out What You Put In

"I think I'll go out and water the tomatoes" I said to Jessica thinking that I had not watered the tomatoes growing on the deck and on the side of the house. It had been at least a week since I'd even thought about the tomatoes languishing and dying in the neglected wick systems in the back yard. "Aren't you going to pick those red tomatoes?" Jessica asks, and "It's raining and they're being flooded back there."

I wasn't even sure what she was talking about since I had abandoned the wick system in my mind since the other two systems were doing so much better. There were tons of tomatoes in the three pots on the deck and quite a few, though smaller for the most part (cultivars) on the four tomato plants by the side of the yard. But I said, "Sure I'll go out and look and bring back any red ones."

In the back yard the wick system looked run down and the plants mostly dead or dying straggly, but the tomatoes on them had ripened and I picked ten and brought them in. They were mostly small donas which are a tomato I really like although Jessica thinks they are way too small. But they are very round, very red, and very tasty. I put the ten on my digital kitchen scale where I weigh all my tomatoes. They weighed in at 1# 1oz — 17 ounces total.

I took out my pocket notebook and made a note. That brought the total of the Late Start Systems to 114 tomatoes with a weight of 204.125 ounces, an average of less that two ounces each although there were some tomatoes that had come in at around 13 ounces it wasn't very many. And this is the total as of September 27th — It won't be too long now before the cold weather sets in. So starting late has been not too smart. I have to get a picture of the many many tomatoes on the plants in the deck pots. They are the most luxurious growth this year.

Live and learn really. You get out of things what you put into them. My motivation for the wick systems was to try for a system I didn't have to maintain too much. It worked for a while, but I think the lack of oxygenation probably was a mistake. Still I didn't want to aerate the water or use electrical devices.

I saw a system that was being used in Africa to help people grow hydroponically and they did their aeration by physical shaking the float system making the water splash. They did that for hours a day. That's hard. I suppose I shouldn't complain about what happened when I chose to do nothing. I didn't run out my aquarium air pump and pump tiny bubbles into the water. I just let things sit. I'll have to think of some other recipe for the passive system. Wick systems without oxygenation seem to be a bit of a dead end. Of course it could have been something else. The plants did end up with some plant diseases so I suppose I should do some research in that direction too.

For all the soul searching, the kitchen counter is full of tomatoes. Jessica and I don't need nearly as many tomatoes as we get, although this year with the late start we've not been getting anything like past seasons. Later on I'll put up a contrast between this year and years past with earlier starts.

Tomato Anxiety

Well the Summer is mostly done and my very late start certainly has compromised my harvest, but since I don't do this just to get tomatoes but also to acquire knowledge it has been helpful. The current status of the systems is:

• Wick Systems: pretty much a disaster, whether for lack of attention or disease or failure to aerate the systems or possibly failure to cycle the nutrient and rebalance. I intentionally did almost nothing and the result is that most of the plants contracted some kind of disease and seem to have largely died. Oddly, several are still healthy enough to maintain their leaves and have lots of green tomatoes on them, so I'm still maintaining the nutrient strength.
• House Systems: the systems on the side of the house (4 plants with cut out plastic cups at the base for watering in a typical Virginia clay soil, really poor soil. ) Some Miracle Gro applied randomly, not systematic at all. Two of the four plants have some sort of disease, but all have significant numbers of fruit set and developing. Because of the disease some of the fruit is a little surface spotted.
• Deck Systems: the deck systems are three pots and of the three systems these are flourishing the best. One of the plants has some minor disease, all have significant amounts of fruit set. They have been randomly fertilized with Miracle Gro as well.

Total Harvest: Because of the late start tomatoes have only been coming off the plants sporadically. The very first came off on August 29th and 30th -- a single 1 3/4 oz tomato from the house sytem was harvested and the next day 3 1 oz. tomatoes came off the wick system. Many of the plants are cherries or other smaller tomatoes like donas. Today a total of 43 tomatoes but only 56 5/8 oz. total have come off the systems. That's only about 3.5 pounds, so not much so far, especially given the number of plants.

I'll be tracking this until the end of the growing season which will probably come sometime in October. The late start from seed, May 21st — has compromised the yield and I'd say right now that the wick systems have been a failure despite a very promising start. So it's back to the drawing board there. I'd like to find a system that doesn't require electricity or a lot of monitoring. The wick systems have filled both those requirements for the most part, but after all the purpose is to grow tomaotes and will I've taken quite a few off the wick system so far (34 of the 43 taken so far came from the wick system, they've all been pretty small). The biggest tomatoes have come off the deck system: one at 6 7/8 oz. and two at slightly over 10 oz (one 10 3/8 and the other at 10 1/8 oz.).

We'll see how things develop in the weeks to come. Historically using NFT systems I've gotten a lot more tomatoes but you can't really assess things until you're further into the harvest season.

How Does This Work?

I just reviewed some of the past posts and picked up the fact that some remarks had been left. Sorry I didn't pick up on that earlier and respond. I thought I'd comment on how keeping the plants going is working. Right now the main thing I have to do is keep all the plants in water. Tomato plants transpire (something like perspire) a large amount of water. I've been distributing three gallons of water twice a day among seven plants (four on the side of the house in rather poor clay soil, and three in potting soil in pots on the side deck).

There are fifteen tomato plants in the back yard, five per plastic tub, each tub holding about eight gallons of water. These plants are transpiring around a gallon to one and a half gallons per day. Because the roots extend rather far into the nutrient the tubs can go for several days without being topped off. On hot days the plants tend to transpire more water than nutrient so that the concentration of nutrient actually increases as the water is transpired. I top those tubs off just by putting a hose into the tubs for a short while to replace the water. Then I check the nutrient concentration. A rule of thumb for my nutrient (Total Grow's Steiner) is that an ounce of concentrate will take the Conductivity Factor up about 2 units and I'm running the system at a total CF of 22 to 24.

The wick systems have been left alone for three days and only gone down around two or three gallons. That will increase as the plants continue to grow. I like the passive character of the wick systems although frankly the plants grow somewhat better in NFT systems. NFT systems though require pumps and continuous flow. If the pumps fail or you don't keep the nutrient tank full your system can get into trouble rather quickly. Four or five hours with the pumps down will likely kill most fo the plants, especially on a hot day. So NFT systems require a lot more monitoring. I'm looking forward to tomatoes turning red soon so I can harvest some.