16,949 Garden Web Discussions | Growing Tomatoes

I never post here. I just read. I thought some viewpoints were missing in this thread. I have no opposition to drip irrigation, but I think there are a lot of misconceptions about the efficacy of wicking beds in general that are exemplified within this thread in particular.

It's always difficult to play the "which is better" game because it's usually a trade-off of benefits and considerations. So don't take this as an endorsement of one over the other, just some added perspective.

Wicking beds can be made to serve deep rooted plants and even trees:

http://www.waterright.com.au/Wicking_bed_under_construction.pdf
(Note the second photo explanation in this link).

Wicking beds are well suited to arid regions, but this does mean they are problematic in high water regions. All wicking bed designs should include a drain component to them. This can be done in a variety of ways including creating a natural run-off. In fact a high water region would have advantages as the new water would rotate wicking water automatically.

http://www.waterright.com.au/Weather and wicking beds.pdf

Since good wicking design also involves soil with good capillary action and thus proper drainage, it is not likely to prove a disadvantage in high water regions. If a person is having problems with growth due to too much water, they should take a critical examination of their drainage and soil compaction issues, not wicking bed concepts.

http://www.waterright.com.au/newletter march 2013.htm

In terms of water conservation, I don't know that one is over the other. While the value of wicking beds is known for arid regions, dripping is also of noteworthy for the same. Both are noted for advantages beyond water conservation.

If wicking beds boast one major advantage, it is that they are effective in maintaining a self regulating soil moisture conducive to healthy growth. This is done without repeated adjustments or replacement of components.

wicking disadvantages, include the risk the build up of anaerobic bacteria in the water and many first timers, often buying a retail or E-Bay product have experienced this without understanding why. It comes down to good aeration of the soil and the water, preferably the soil.

They also are noted for build of concentrations of calcium, salt and other minerals in the bed. This comes from areas with hard water and high evaporation (arid regions tend to have both). So While they can hold water for extended use, there are times when running water into them and flushing them is wise. I can't say how often, but I start for a once a month period. This is why such beds in high water areas are actually an advantage.

http://www.waterright.com.au/newletter 12 Jan 2014.htm

It also impacts the use of plant supplements that are often surface applied with water, which may also contribute to mineral buildup. So using a wicking bed with inorganic mulch (provided by some retailers) and a surface applied plant food isn't going to bring you joy.

However, there are solutions to these just as there are to drip irrigation problems. As I said at the start, it's not about one over the other, it's about trade-offs and understanding them.

It's also not just about understanding the delivery of water. It's about understanding the soil for that method. All of the alternate methods to traditional agriculture partner with views of soil, and nutrients. that need to be taken into account.

I am working with my first wicking bed implementation now. I am taking a different approach by using a continually moving water flow based on ideas in an aquaponics forum.

http://aquaponicsnation.com/forums/topic/8090-the-ultimate-growing-system/

I am hopeful the disadvantages will be overcome this way. However, I am also going to experiment with a rudimentary drip system in the sub-surface that utilizes wicking bed concepts.

That's more than two cents worth and should satisfy my need to post for a couple of years at least.

This post was edited by tripster2001 on Thu, Dec 25, 14 at 3:06

Thanks! Great info!

I don't know anything about PR, but I have seeds ordered for Azoychka and Willamette (both mentioned above) .

Seysonn

EDIT:
@ PC : N-C WA has a totally different climate than we have in N-W WA. They have shorter season, colder winters and hot summers. But here in PNW our temperatures are tamed, We have long frost free season but cooler temperature. 90F is rare around here.

This post was edited by seysonn on Mon, Dec 29, 14 at 7:15

Grew PR 2 years ago from seeds I bought in Italy. It was average in growth, yield, and taste, With no outstanding special qualities, I have not grown it since then.

Get your self some 4' shop lights, T8, and put 32W 6500k bulbs in them. Home Despot carries the bulbs for as low as 3.33/ea if you buy a box of 10. Valdemart, Home Despot, and Menards all carry cheap shop lights that will do the job. You want a T8 fixture that will hold 2 32W bulbs, as narrow as possible so you can fit as many as possible on each shelf. Make sure they are T8 fixtures and not T12 - the cheapest fixtures are generally T12.

Get some wire shelves that are 4' long and 18" to 24" wide - it is super easy to hang fixtures from those wire shelves by the chains that (usually) come with the fixtures.

Unless you don't mind wiring in a power cord, make sure the fixtures you buy come with a pre-wired power cord and plug.

You will not believe the difference it will make to your seedlings. Even one dual-bulb T8 fixture will help - 2 of them per shelf (for a total of 4 32W bulbs between them) will solve all your seed-starting woes.

Check out megagreenhouse.com for plant trays that will fit on your shelves - to catch any drips or spills. Also planting flats and pots.

Set up an oscillating fan in front of your grow shelves - to protect from overheating due to the heat from the lights, to keep the air moving so fungus doesn't get a start, and to strengthen the stems of your seedlings.

Get varieties acclimated to your super hot climate. Look for heat resistant varieties and varieties with a short maturation. Cherry tomatoes and paste types allegedly do well in your climate.

Here is a link that might be useful: Growing Tomatoes in Arizona

As noted in a recent posting, just plant them SIDEWAYS. Yep, just lay them down in a trench and cover the stems with decent soil. Leave the leaf end above the soil where you want the plant to be. For the plants growing an inch apart in the same pot, just transplant the whole pot in the middle of the bed, extend the trenches in different directions, and lay each plant along a different trench. If the stems aren't so old that they refuse to root, that'll guarantee survival and probably even production. No cutting.

No need to apologize!

I looked at the forum a bit before I posted the question but I missed the previous discussion, and actually hadn't even gotten on the computer for a week, so that's why the delay in me asking.

I have security on my computer and I try to be careful about what I open, since I was told that the damage starts when you open it (although I don't know that that is always the case, as fast as things change when tech is involved))

I had a feeling it was bogus email, so I never opened it . Things I have gotten for years randomly end up in my spam so now I just look there first, sort it and then look at my inbox.

Dawn

Dawn, and thanks for reminding me of your name, OK to open it but don't click on any links inside nor respond to it.

I have a picture in my mind of possibly you and some others I used to know well leaning on some pallets in the side yard at Hortus. And maybe you remember my dog and pony show as well as my sitting out near the front entrance sighning copies of my book where there was a canopy and it was hot as H withTom Wagner sitting next to me as he asked to do. LOL

And staff from Hortus bringing out pitchers of icy tomato juice. It's too bad that Hortus had to close but the plant sales still called Tomatomania live on and every season I get an e-mail with the schedule of where they will be held, mostly in S Cal.

Carolyn, who also gets from time to time em's from Mary-Anne Durkee asking me to come back or to join linked in.

I had no clue what :"keyhole gardens" were until I opened this thread. It turned out that it is a concept that has been on my wish list for a few years since the Garden Tower came out (not to confuse with the rip-off Tower Garden), which is in some respects is a supercharged version of the keyhole gardens right here in the USA, undertaken by home gardeners in every US state.

The Garden Tower system dumps all kitchen and vegetable waste into a central worm cylinder, same sort of thing as the keyhole. The worms accelerate the composting and enhance the nutritional value, so it can properly be called a vermicomposting system which is not as passive, making it a cleaner thing IMO as if you don't emphasize the role of the worms and just have fermentation and rotting going on from microorganisms.

The worms then move from the central cylinder aerating and carrying finished poopy fertilizer throughout the rest of the bed pretty fast since they are young and restless. In the plastic small design Garden Tower there is no need to clear a path to walk to the compost tube since the whole thing is small enough to reach.

But I can easily see a tailored setup any home gardener could make if they want to grow larger plants like tomatoes, where a wider garden bed setup would do for greens. For that, I had thought about a central tube that doubled as a support spine from which the vines could be hung. One small version might be to half bury a liner or even do it in a recessed garbage can if you wanted to keep the nutrients from leaching down and put 4-6 tomato plants in each one each with its own vermicomposting factory core, and maybe use it as a cookie cutter design if it gave good results. Something like that might work well in Florida as long as you could keep the nematodes out which seems like it could work.

Garden Tower Project (vermicomposting)

PC

ha, Garden Tower?
Sounds like a winner for space challenged, specially living in warmer areas where it will not go completely frozen during winter...

This is not a recommendation But I will grow the followings:

--- Hahms Gelbe Topftomate (German)
--- Polish Dwarf.
I have just picked these 2 randomly and based on Sample Seeds Shop's description. I should mention that I will grow them outside in pots.

The picture below (from internet): Hahms Gelbe Topftomate
Seysonn

Very cool Seyson! I intend to grow those two next year!

I have to second Ted's recommendation for Dwarf Arctic Rose. I grew it inside last winter and it was incredibly prolific, giving me tons of large pink tomatoes!

Linda

This past week my password to my browser was hacked and it's my entree to the net. No way do I want to discuss it here, has been in detail by those who received the bogus e-mails and some of them are computer experts. Just don't think that your ant-virus or malware stuff you have on your computer will stop password problems from happening and what happened is too complicated to discuss here.

My browser informed me of the problem the same day some recipents did and said to change my password, using their suggestions for a high security one and I did.

So no, I am not going to list my em address in my profile.

And I have several long time friends in Belarus, Germany and elsewhere who send me Russian varieties for my seed offer elsewhere. And until recently I was sending seeds to Russia.And of course Tania lists many hundreds as well

I keep no address book online for obvious reasons, but have perhaps thousands of e-mails over time from those who want to participatre in my seed offer since they have to send me an e-mail to request my address so they can send me a SASE. Those outside the US send me an em with what they want and I pay all the postege back to whatever country they live in, which is not cheap, thus lessening the money in my dark bittersweet chocolate budget. LOL

Carolyn

Sorry to hear about what sounds like a description of a hacked email account and a limited list of contacts that were spammed using your online email account.

A month ago, a trojan malware nailed my computer and it was hell. I torched the compromised operating system on the old hard drive which had as many holes as cyber Swiss Cheese (Emmental cheese), then ran triple virus cleaning programs on the old drive, and bought a new drive to reinstall the operating system and now have the old one accessible as a data drive with all the old directory structure and files intact, and a completely new strategy to isolate my main drive.

So, it's a cyber jungle out there and it seems to be a free-for-all with no perfect strategy excpet to be skeptical and vigilent at all times.

Mailing all that internationally on your own dime, the way rates have gone postal ... next time you stick your hand in the cupboard for a chocolate you might only find a bittersweet postage due notice LOL

PC

Celebrity has shown much more tolerance of low water conditions than most other tomatoes I've grown outdoors. The fruit is not huge, but makes reasonable slices. I find that the fruit is not as sweet as some other tomatoes. I've allowed the plant to sprawl on the ground, and this also does seem to help with the low water conditions: fewer of the leaves are exposed. Stupice might be considered a low water variety also by some, but you may find that you need to deal with some blossom end rot if you don't provide more water. For me, BER is not too big a deal; I can just cut off the affected portion. The other hint for Stupice would be to plant the transplant really deep in the ground when you transplant so that there are lots of roots at different levels in the soil. Stupice is not a super vigorous variety so you may not need to prune or train, and the compact growth probably does protect the plant from too much moisture loss.
Renais

Thanks for that info, Renais!

On the online catalog website in the cherry section, it does say "Indeterminate, open-pollinated" right at the beginning of the description by the picture of Sugar Gem. So you're in luck!

Hmm. Amy's Apricot cherry sounds interesting too ....

Ah, great. Thanks! Now, Apricot Cherry is indeed marked as "heritage" in my printed catalog. Yes, that one seems to be a winner too.

But I'm still interested in anyone who's had some experience with, well, either.

I was Very disappointed with the Husky Cherry Red I planted this year. It was planted next to a jet star plant which remained healthy all year. But the Husky Cherry got some kind of a disease which caused all the branches to turn brown and die. I do not intend to plant Husky Cherry again.

Thanks, BeeAnn. Sorry that happened, but I have to say that so far mine is just chugging along in its slowish, imperturbable way. Has the first teeny little buds on it now, but the weather here has been pretty cold at night so I don't know if anything will come of them.

I suppose that I answered my own question. "Amish Paste" is any paste tomato grown by the Amish! LOL

Just a few comments.

I used to grow Amish Paste for my SSE listings and never had it cross and I grew too many varieties to bag blossoms. I do not consider it to be a paste tomato since it's far too juicy IMO. But xing percentages do differ in different parts of the country as well as in different seasons

Tania's page for Amish Paste/

http://tatianastomatobase.com/wiki/Amish_Paste

I introduced one called Amish Salad

http://tatianastomatobase.com/wiki/Amish_Salad

What's my point? Names are given to many varieties, and here we're talking about Amish, and it;s not always clear that they were grown by the Amish, just presumed so as seeds are passed around.

Cherokee Purple, it was NOT a phony story at first b'c When John Green gave the seeds to Craig Lehoullier John said it was a 100 years old as told to him by the woman who gave him the seeds, It was only after Mulio aka Keith Mueller,, who posts here occasionally posted the information about which gf alleles differ between so called blacks had that it became clear that it was NOT 100 yo.

Such gf DNA analysis was not known in 1992 when Craig named the variety

And there are several scenarios that have been put forward as to where it might have come from.

I've linked to that gf data at the bottom of the page and scroll down until you see the post by Mulio in April.

And no, Amish Paste is not any variety grown by the Amish, I could list quite a few here that were grown by the Amish, or Mennonites as far as that goes, that are not pastes at all.

All for now.

Carolyn

Here is a link that might be useful: gf alleles

As mentioned , it depends on several factors:

--- Growth habit ( determinant, indeterminant, aggressive, bushy )
-- Spacing: Example: if you space them 3ft apart and use a tall (6ft) sturdy cage, there would be less need for pruning. But if you practice sqr-ft gardenin or space them closely ( I do 18") then you'll need to do some pruning.
---- Climate: In warm, sunny climates foliage can be a plus to shade but with cooler weather, rainy conditions it is opposite.

But at any case, it is recommended to prune any and all the leaf branches close to the ground, to provide air flow and prevent soil borne disease, molds.

You have to do some reading and familiarize your self with the issue, pertinent to your growing conditions and the varieties.

Seysonn

I personally prune the heck out of my tomato plants, but that is b/c I try and get as many different varieties within a square foot space as possible.

I typically allow 2 to 3 stems and use the drop-line technique, which excels at allowing for space efficiency as well as air flow (see link below).

For this reason, I tend to have less quantity of tomatoes per tomato plant, but of the ones that grow tend to be larger than normal..

smithmal

Here is a link that might be useful: