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Well, our results have been dismall! BER is still dominating both tub plants. The physical set-up has worked well, but we believe we have some serious nutriant block. The plants are not doing well and they are not growing out of it. Here is a shot of the netting and plant weave that has worked well. The tomatoes are hanging below the net is a perfect fashion. Just like my favorite move, " the Worlds Fastest Indian" there are some horrible failures along the way to pushing the envelope. Look at our unfortinate red tomatoes in this pic.
Yo
u can clearly see the big roma hybrids failing at a small size, but hanging nicely below the net. The overall plants are not hat much better.
The peppers has a serious Beastie infestation but I have my first bell pepper showing up.
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The spinach and basil are OK and i have a few seedlings for a friend that wants to start plants early in some Wall of Waters.
That's about it for now, maybe some better results as the weeks progress.
Larry
The count at the moment for toamtoes is 11 on the Big Momma plant after removing three with BER. The iguana ate them and seemed pretty happy about it. The Big boy plant in the tub has three tomatoes, but the flowering sites are very prolific. 6-8 blossoms per site. That palnt was always about a week behind, but the slightly sloer growth and the non-roma variety may save us. The big boy in the regular pat has three toamtoes as well and is really cruising along nicely. Lot's of aphids on peppers and spinach, but some soap spray seems to be knocking down their numbers. The pepper plants are all blooming very well, with lot's of sites. I can't wait to see some of those flowers opening. Lot's of activity and good growth. I am startinf a feww early plants for a friend at work, but a few cuttings in the cloner are not producing roots very fast. They seem to wilt long before they root, even with rooting hormone on them. I may try misting them and keep the heater from blowing across the leaves. Picked up another orphan Orchid off the discount rack at Lowes. The spike with floer loactions was brocken off, but the plant it'sself looked great. $3 could not pass it up. I have a friend at work that says I will get totally consumed with orchids and will have 200 next year. Since I can not eat them and they don't make tomatoes, i am not sure I agree with his prediction. Happy Gardening.
Larry
I spent a tough week at my parents house last week as my father passed away. He has been ill and at 92 he had decided he was done. All 6 kids got to see him over the holidays and my kids got to spend some time. It is still always hard.
Got home after a week and found lots ( 15 tomatoes) and the plants looked pretty good. Then I saw BER ( Blossom End Rot ) I have only read about it on forums, never saw it on any of my patio or outdoor plants. Here is the sad picture.
There are 2-3 that look like they are affected on the Big Momma roma plant. Ther eare lots of reasons on the various forums, but fast growing plants are especially prone to this problem. We also might have overdone our potasium level with the corn cob ash. That is one of the listed triggers. Most plant swill grow out of it so we are hoping for the best. A foliar spray with epsom salts is a potential help to improve the calcium levels and distribution in the plant. The big boy so far does not seem affected. We will keep our fingers crossed. Here is an overall shot of both plants in the screen.
The spinach is really going wild.
We also had a real aphid infestation upon our return as well. They are covering the peppers that really look good and are starting to bloom. speaking of blooms, our orchid has three now and is looking very nice!.
Very sad week, some real set- backs in the indoor garden and a great loss for me and my family. We will get through this and continue on. Happy gardening everyone.
Larry
Yes this REALLY snuck up on me! I posted blossom pictures Sat and I found this tiny guy today.
I am completely stunned. We are only 6 weeks from germination. Now hold your breath that we do not get BER or something and the little guy falls off. Sorry for the rant, I am pretty excited.
Larry <
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I got the camera card so we have pictures now. Let's start with blossom shots becauae that is what it is all about anyway. We moved our air pump supplying the air to the bubbler tubs to try a pseudo bumble bee trick on the flowers. This pump vibrates a lot and if it sits on the floor it will often move across to rest against a table leg and make an awfull racket. Holding it in my hand feeling the vibration we got an idea. Put it on the wire screen and vibrate the plants to polinate the flowers. It vibrates the whole screen slightly and you can see the tips of some leaves shaking at a high pitch. isn't bumble bee vibrations or electric tooth brush simulation supposed to work? It is a lot quieter too.
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Zach and I have both noticed the plants in the poultry sreen are pretty ugly. A lot of leaf curl spots and the leaves and generally not as pretty as the control big boy plant in the regular pot. We attribute this appearance and general stress to how hard we are pushing the plants. Now don't get me wrong, they are still growing like some form of mutant banshee, but they are ugly. A shot of phosphorus today and bloom set spray will only continue the mad dash. We are speculating that once the tomatoes start fruiting it may slow the aggressive growth a bit, which is a good thing. We do not want to fill the screen next month. Now the plants need to concentrate on fruiting.
The control plant is absolutely awesome. It is about a foot tall, super stocky and a real nice looking plant. We are supercropping it vigorously, even the suckers that we choose to keep.
A Stem shot with our good old # 2 pencil.
The rest of the plants are doing great as well. The spinach is awesome but it has developed a really weird problem. Every once in a while entire mature leaves are just gone. For no reason and part of the leaf stem is still there. We are not sure what the affliction could possibly be. Take alook at the pic and notice the empty leaf stems. Any ideas out there?
It is real weird. Oh just a minute, I believe we have isolated the problem.
If you can not tell he is smiling, I believe we have solved the mystery.
One of the other real succeses has been our Bougainvillia. It had 5% of it's leaves left right after I brought it inside from the patio. It has come back with a huge vengence.
We had the same problem with our Lantana Tree. These are annuals usually used for boarders etc. They can be trained and pruned to simulate a dwarf tree. Here is the flower and one of the overall plants. We may clone some of these over the next few months and use them for a border area in the yard. Build a cloner, I am sure we can squeeze that in this week-end.
Our basil and bell pepper starts are doing great too. The peppers have been super cropped and seem to do well with it.
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Basil
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Sorry for the long update, but I did not want to leave anyone out and hurt their feelings. Enjoy and happy gardening.
Larry
Blooms are open today!
Is that a thing of beauty or what? 24 degrees theis AM, 11 below 0 this week and below 0 almost all day. The tomatoes are happy .
Larry
Larry
A big day today with the discovery of our first flowers. Upon closer inspection, all the crowns and suckers have flowers on them. Even the regular big boy in the typical pot has flowers starting. Now on to polination and maybe our first tomato. Wow!
Tomorrows agenda is a nice corn cob ash tea to really kick off the flowering cycle. Next week end Superbloom and the flowering hormone. This is pretty fun.
As an added benafit Orchids are blooming in the tomato room. Pretty nice
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Larry
^first pinch the stem adjacent to the wire where the shoot has come up similar to the supercropping process. However, do not pinch and rotate and do not pinch from multimple directions as usual. You want to flatten the stem slightly so that it easily beds over the adjacent wire so that it looks like this:
^Obse
rve the flatness just above my left thumb. Next you will bend the plant over the adjacent wire as shown below. It should give quite easily due to the flattening process, if it doesn't, re-pinch and start again.
^bending^
Now that you have gotten the stem at a 90-ish degree angle along the "boarder" wire that separates the hole in the screen the shoot grew up through from the adjacent hole you are aiming for you can begin to pull it through like this:
^pulling^
Be careful during this step and bunch up the leaves so that they don't tear on the way through. If you did it right the hard part is over and the plant should now look like this: 
^neatly tucked beneath the screen^
Note how I've managed the leaves, pulling them through adjacent holes and letting them come to rest on top, the opposite of what is done to the plants that this technique was developed for. Now all that is left to do is poke the top of the crown through the next hole over, the third one involved in this process: 
^the completed weave^
Jobs a good'un. You may want to sort out the smaller leaves near the top of the crown and get them laying on top of the screen where they belong. Also, once the crown is in its final position I like to supercrop all of the horizontal stem section except for the very top node to lock the vine into place and toughen up the stem to avoid any abrasive effect that the wire might have on the skin. Now the crown will soon resume growth and turn upwards towards the light. Once it has gotten 3 or 4 inches tall we will repeat the process and the cycle will continue indefinitely. I hope this has been informative, good luck and happy gardening!
-Zach
1-5 Update
Holidays are over and it is back to work. The tomatoes are growing well and are starting to go through our screen. The supercropping and high light levels are still keeping the plants very stocky. This helps in our overall strategy as well. Short internodal gaps create several suckers below the screen and close to the root system which is favorable for good nutrient flow. The plan is to have the crown and 3 suckers per plant weaving in the poultry netting. All other suckers will be removed. Both plants already have 3 suckers and the main vine, so everything else is removed as it develops. Here are a couple of pictures showing the height above the netting and overall plant size.
^Can you believe the leaf on the big boy lower right it has to be a foot long^
We have such good vegitative growth, we will add a HPS light to our mix and start pushing the plants to flower. That is a combination of HPS light, flowering hormone and potasium and potash in our fertilizer. We will see if we can get a few of the yellow gems to show up over the next few weeks.
Larry
^ I added a week five picture above in comparison to week 4 just below. Gives a good perspective of growth in 6 days^
Well, here we are at week 4 and what a change. That is 4 weeks from germination! Wow! So far Big Boy and Fat Momma have been growing at a fairly even rate, slowly, methodically, biding their time until I wasn't looking. They've packed on more above-ground plant mass over this past week then they've generated during their first 3 weeks, really getting into their stride now. They where slightly dehydrated when we got back, it wasn't bad, they where just a little wilty which shows in the pictures. 
Yea 
Fat Momma has gone nuts, what where tiny little sucker starts when we left are now massive out-of-control shoots that have stretched well past the height of the main stem and begun to penetrate the screen. A little supercropping has halted the taller one in its tracks and it should assume a slower, stockier growth rate from here on out. Still, I am impressed with how thick it is without any help from me. This is the "learning" I have been alluding to, although it obviously hasn't helped the internodal gaps any, they're HUGE. 
^Momma's little suckers before we left^ 
^Momma's suckers today, holy crap!^
As impressive as this growth is, it has come at a price. Big boy's suckers haven't shown nearly the development of these and there is a reason for that: 
This is a shot of the stem leading up to Fat Momma's crown. Before we left I got a little over-zealous with the supercropping in a bid to make sure she didn't get too out of control whilst we where gone. As a result her main stem has made almost no progress other than packing on extra leaves and general girth. Happily it has scabbed over quite well and looks to have recently resumed development, so all is well. Because of the super-streachy suckers Momma has already penetrated the screen level and I have been able to pull a couple of leaves through as seen below: 
This is the very beginning of her training regiment, though it will still be a little while before the stems have grown long enough to go into their first step of the "weave"
Big boy on the other hand has stuck much more closely to what we're traditionally looking for. 
Big, bushy and with massive leaves, look at this thing! 
His stem has also caught up to Momma's quite nicely, even surpassing hers in some places: 
He was bigger than his twin brother last week, but now he's really pulling away! 
^A perfectly healthy plant, just fine by all standards, but absolutely puny compared to his twin brother.
Well, thats about it, I'm sure this update was more fun, more pictures and fewer boring explanations. Tune in next week to see new pictures and track their progress, though at the rate they're growing I may sneak in a few pictures before then. We'll have additional updates related to this grow soon including DIY remote ballast HPS lamps and the all-important potassium-rich corn-sob ash tutorial. See you then and happy gardening!
-Zach
The rest of the pants are doing very well also, our very sad basil has really made a come-back after a long stagnent period.
^Very Sad Basil Recovering^
The pepper plants that just had their first leaves are now in to a second and third pair. We are not sure if supercropping will work on them, but we have 3 per pot so we will guinee pig at leaste one to see how it does. We have both bell and jalapeno varieties.
^Jalapeno Starts^
The spinich looks so good the iguana is eying it already. He is only 4-5 feet away, so he probably wonders about the jungle growing around him. We watered when we got home and I was happy to see the humidity above 60%.
^ Spinach^
One other really impressive thing about our well lighted grow room is the plants that are just supposed to be wintering over.are going absolutely nuts! I was hoping not to kill them off and they look 100% better then when I brought them inside. One in particular I had given up for dead after it dropped 90% of it's leaves. Maybe somebody out there knows the name of this plant as I do not know and there is not a tag anymore. Besides the destinctive flower shown below, it has dark green waxy leaves and nice long pointy thorns. Any input from the experts out there?
^ The first person to ID wins the big Prize^
That is about all for now. Enjoy Larry
12-30 Update:
No ID on the plant yet
1-5 Update
Holidays are over and it is back to work. The tomatoes are growing well and are starting to go through our screen. The supercropping and high light levels are still keeping the plants very stocky. This helps in our overall strategy as well. Short internodal gaps create several suckers below the screen and close to the root system which is favorable for good nutrient flow. The plan is to have the crown and 3 suckers per plant weaving in the poultry netting. All other suckers will be removed. Both plants already have 3 suckers and the main vine, so everything else is removed as it develops. Here are a couple of pictures showing the height above the netting and overall plant size.
Since
We have such good vegitative growth, we will add a HPS light to our mix and start pushing the plants to flower. That is a combination of HPS light, flowering hormone and potasium and potash in our fertilizer. We will see if we can get a few of the yellow gems to show up over the next few weeks.
Larry
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