Winter tomato experiment

[Alan]

Here are a few pics that I wanted to share of our winter tomato growing experiment in 06/07. We produced roughly 400 lbs from 50 plus tomato plants with no additional lighting! Not bad.

[bunkie]

wow alan, that's awesome! did you grow them in your basement? in how big containers? they must be like cirus, in needing heat more than light?! peace, bunkie.

[houseodessey]

I want more info, too!

[Alan]

Nope, these are in one one of the two 20 x 48' greenhouses. The pictures were taken at night though because thats when I tend to do all the suckering and the such. We grew them in 5 gallon nursery containers using a soil mix of peat, perlite, vermiculite, and lime. I fertilized using bonemeal, bloodmeal, and ash from the wood stove I use to heat the greenhouse. We also used some bat and seabird guano to fertilize with. The plants were watered every 3 days and fertilized every seven days. I kept them suckered down to one terminal and hand pollinated with an electric toothbrush. The were tied to the greenhouse structure to keep them off of the ground. We grew a combination of Burbank Slicing tomato, campbells 1327, and red ponderosa.
We also added lots of european nightcrawlers to the soil to keep it well aerated.

If you want to know anything else then just ask!
-Alan

[houseodessey]

Does your greenhouse get full sun? You said no additional light but I saw shoplites. Are they just so you can see while suckering and not close enough to count as growing light? I ask because I have a small "greenhouse" that gets a lot of shade from my oak trees but I'm determined to grow some tomatoes in there during our hot months when everything shuts down outside and in the winter with a heater, too. I thought if I could use 4-6 flourescents in addition to the partial sun, it may be possible. Let me know if you can advise me at all.

[Alan]

Yeah, the greenhouse gets full sun during the day (which in the winter isn't saying a whole lot (not to mention that the greenhouse is facing the wrong direction)! There are a couple of shop lights that stay on at all times just so I can find my way to the wood stove in the wee hours of the night and morning. However, they aren't close enough to the plants to make any real difference. You should be able to grown tomatoes no problem in the wintertime if you can keep them heated, about 75 - 80 degrees in the day and no lower that 55-60 at night and hand pollinate, additional lighting would definetly help.
-Alan

[bunkie]

alan, is your greenhouse glassed or plastic and can you tell us a bit about your woodstove set-up? thanks! peace, bunkie.

[Alan]

Our greenhouses are all 6 mil plastic covered, minus my first purchase which was a rion (do not buy one, it will blow apart) which is made of panels.

The Stove (soon to be stoves when we finish the other 20 X 48) is this model:

www.usstove.com/cgi-bin/csvsearchProdindivid.pl?ID=126

Instead of the straight pipes up, we have one angeld pipe whic has is open off the stove and blows on the back side of the greenhouse, the second is piped up to the celing and down the top of the house and blows out in the mid-front of the greenhouse. We heat using scrap pallet wood (the excess cut from the lumber pallets are made from, fairly large blocks) that we buy for $20 a truckload (of any size truck we can find) from my fathers friend, we also cut some wood and buy some regular fire wood from another friend, we also occasionally use some coal. In the middle of winter on a cold night (15-20 degrees) we can keep the greenhouse at 60-70 degrees, during the days in the winter if the sun is out there is no reason to run the stove, sometimes it warms up enough to open the greenhouse. The smoke outlet is piped out the back of the frame and up about 4 and a half feet above the greenhouse. We have had no problems with sparks escaping in two plus years, the only thing that we have to do is clean the plastic with mild bleach and dishwashing soap on he back end of the greenhouse every spring and fall so that it isn't stained by the smoke.

I hope this helps


I know i'm not highly technical, i'm sorry.

I very highly reccomend that stove to anyone looking into running the kind of operation that I am, it's great and very reliable!
-alan

[jeannine]

Pretty cool Alan! I did an experiment of sorts myself this winter, much smaller scale and didn't get a lot of maters but! Early fall I took three tomato plants; one was a sucker, one was a volunteer and last one was an actual seed start and put them in 5 gal buckets on the front porch until the cold weather set in. I started by just bringing them indoors for the night time, and eventually I had to bring them in full time by a southern window. I only got 5 tomatoes, but I didn't give them any extra lighting, only what came through the window so I wasn't really surprised. The main idea was to see if I could actually keep them alive for the winter, if I got tomatoes that would be great too! The great thing though is that I now have 2 full grown tomato plants and should have a good head start of at least having home-growns for the house way ahead of usual! I did lose one plant, just to clarify, I was putting them out on the porch on nice days and we had one day that got super windy, I wasn't home so it got badly damaged and I just could save it. It was a fun experiment, but unless I get a greenhouse I wont do it again, LOL, having 3 large tomato plants in your living room might look cool to company but they got to be in the way.

Jeannine