I would like to tell you that growing tomatoes like these is easy, but it's not, it's hot, hard work. It's great work and very rewarding when you get to a market and all the folks are telling you how great they are. Up til now it has been pretty easy stuff preparing for the new season, we have cleaned and sanitized every square foot of this giant ass greenhouse. We have reinstalled all the drain lines and buckets, and today we finished filling the buckets with perlite, well except for about 12 bags worth that will be planted in a few weeks, closer to market time. Luckily I had some help from our old buddy Greenhouse Man!
Just kidding, that's just me in a respirator... fooled ya huh?
So after the perlite and planting we did last week, it's time to string some of these fast grower up, they have already grown tall enough to start falling over under their own weight.
Stringing time!!
Stringing the tomatoes isn't all that hard, but it is time consuming, and hot, anytime you get on a ladder or rolling scaffold you get up in the higher areas of the greenhouse, and heat rises so you know what that means. It might be 80 degrees at floor level but it will be 90 or so up higher. So up on the scaffolding it is...of course!
View from up above the plants, s you can see how the plants in the third bucket have started falling over.
Let's Do This
So it's up on the scaffold we go, I bring along a crate of spools that are wrapped with nylon twine, any natural fibers would rot away in the high humidity conditions we have inside this place. The spools have a hook to hang off of a steel cable that is run across the top brace of the tomato support system, you'll see how this system works in a later post when we start to lean and lower.
Back to Plant Level
After hanging all these spools, approximately 180 per row, it's finally time to get back on the ground and clipped the plants to the string, this is the hard part of this operation for me anyway. I'm just over six feet tall so stooping over and clipping plants is tough on this old mans back , so I get my wife who is shorter to do rhese back breaking tasks....ok ok I help too, but she is closer to the plants and does a way better job at it!
Next step we get the plastic, biodegradable clips and clip it to the string and around the main stem of the plant, rinse and repeat again and again until the entire row is done. Do you notice a lot of repetition?? I sure do.
The clips are designed in such a way that it will grip the string and not allow any slippage, yet hardly put any pressure on the stem of the plant stem.
So after all the plants are clipped to the string you have a rather spider webby looking greenhouse, with plants that are hopefully growing straight up to the sunlight!
The clipping process will repeat often as the plants grow, and as soon as the plants grow to about eight or nine feet tall, we will start the lean and lower process...probably the most time consuming part of the growing operation. Along with the lean and lowering, each plant will have suckers removed to keep one growing tip going. Suckers are the branching stems that grow from the stem at the point where the leaf attaches.
We will cover that more when the time comes.
So until then, thanks for stopping by and checking out our greenhouse adventures!