Growing Tomatoes

My father has always grown a healthy crop of tomatoes every year. Each year he tries a different method and over the years has grown quite a healthy crop … enough to give tomatoes away to everyone he knows and still has a plentiful bounty to keep for himself. He likes tomatoes quite a bit and eats them with almost everything.

I’ve tried to take up my father’s hobby and found it quite difficult

2021

I bought a commercial “tub” for growing vegetables, and it was a LOT of money. Like hundreds of dollars for everything. My wife kept making fun of me about how much money I was spending to grow a single tomato, and I’ll give her props when she’s right, that was one expensive tomato! I ended up struggling quite a bit with wind, watering every day and just keeping the damn thing from not dying for most of the summer. I grew maybe 4 good-sized tomatoes over the whole summer which was not at all worth it or respectable.

The one take-away from the expensive “tub” system was its wicking system. It had tubes going down on the corners of the tub to feed the water to the bottom of the tub and the soil was packed in such a way that the water would make its way up through the soil through capillary action and feed the roots of the plants and actually cause the roots to grow deeper to where they thought that the water was coming from. This made for some interesting root growth, so I had to carry that idea forward in next year’s plan.

2022

I took a break from the tomato game and just bought tomatoes from the store. BORING

2023

So I bought only one tomato plant in 2023 from Costco for somewhere around $20 and it was pretty mature and strong already, so I figured that I couldn’t screw it up too badly. I wanted to use the wicking system that the “tub” used in 2021, so I got a couple of hoses, a water pump and an old tub that I could use as a reservoir. The pot that it came in already had holes in the bottom (they probably use the wicking system to feed the plants at the place where Costco bought the plants from in the first place, so they should be ok being fed/watered this way). I came up with something like this:

I ended up replacing the pump with just a programmable faucet switch that I found on AliExpress for pretty cheap. I ran one switch to my sprinklers and one switch to my tomato plant. The tomato plant turned on for one minute every day at the beginning of the day to give the plant a good drink of water every day. My bucket also has holes drilled in the side of it just an inch above the ground so any over-watering would drain out of the bucket. This way the plants were watered daily, and with a standard amount of water as to not get over-watered.

This (I felt) was a strong start and for the first week or so, the plants were growing nicely and things were going ok … and then …

Hail

I was home when it started to hail, so I was able to run out and rescue the plant from the torrential downfall of little ice cubes of death. We had a bad hail season, and it hailed for several days in the months of May and June. My car got damage. Our roof got damage. Once it started to continue to happen, I figured that I’d make some sort of protective solution for the tomatoes, so I didn’t have to continue to run out at the last second to bring in the plants. This is what I came up with:

Basically a cheap wooden frame and a cheap clear top to still allow sunlight, but not allow hail.

I wrapped some chicken wire around the plant also to keep the squirrels out. I didn’t want them eating my prized tomatoes after all of this effort.

2023 report

I got a couple of dozen tomatoes from the plant over the whole summer. It was a good experiment I thought and good progress without spending hundreds of dollars. The tomato plant was not the type to generate really huge tomatoes so the ones that I got from it were all slightly smaller than a tennis ball in size. Not great, but not horrible either.

2024 plans

My plans for 2024 are to make something more durable for the “pan” that the plants sit in. Maybe something larger to support more plants. Maybe something made out of concrete or something, so it’s more solid and less prone to mold and whatnot.

I’d like to be able to set up a rain catcher too using the hail protector, but since I have the watering system automated, this is less of a priority.

I’d like to re-use/re-capture water if I can.

I’d like to somehow get a fertilizer system in there somewhere, so I can add some fertilizer in a bucket somewhere, and it’ll circulate in the system until it’s absorbed into the soil. Not sure how to do this quite yet. I’m looking into the soil-less solutions like hydroponics because they don’t use soil and have to have some sort of nutrients floating around in the soil at all times. Greenhouses sometimes have live fish as part of their water circulation system and use the fish’s poop as nutrients to the plants.

I don’t think that I’ll introduce fish into the system just yet, but I’d like to have more tomatoes, all protected from hail, with automated water and some fertilizer circulating in the system with it.