Taking a break from cutting brush and moving chunks of wood, and thought you’d like a peek at the greenhouse progress. I had to whack some serious brush just to get in there and take this photo actually, especially the tomatoes which had totally run wild. That’s good though, since the energy will now go into making fruits instead of leaves, which is kinda the whole point.
The first few tomato flowers were having some trouble pollinating, since there’s no wind to knock them around, and no buzzing insects to shake the pollen loose in the flower. A quick look at the google revealed that a lot of folks are using an electric toothbrush, one of those ultrasonic thingies, and holding it briefly against the flower stem. Apparently this mimics the buzzing of bees etc, and does the trick nicely, dislodging the pollen and fertilizing the flower so it will then fruit.
How fucking cool is that?
Tomatoes here, obviously, left foreground and right middle. In the back are beans in the center, with cukes to their right and poblanos in front of them, hiding behind more tomatoes. Right foreground is Bok Choy. Not visible behind me are cabbage, cauliflower, hot peppers, basil and eggplants. You can see I went after the tomatoes with some clippers in a big way, and before I did that it was almost impossible to squeeze into the space in the center there. The sense of scale is distorted a little here—the beans in the background are about 4 feet tall.
Those growing boxes are pretty cool too. There’s a water reservoir in the bottom and a screen which separates it from the soil, and the plants are watered by wicking action out of that. All you have to do is keep the reservoir topped up every couple of days (via the little black tubes you can see here and there) and you’re good to go.
Cool – probably has that fecund steamy, tomato leafy, soily smell too.
Thanks for the peek inside the greenhouse, Gunny. You end up with excess, you know where to overnight it to!
Also thanks for the Elizabeth Warren quote, heartwarming reading first thing in the morning.
I used to work in a commercial greenhouse attached to Reading University. I worked in the cucumber section but used to help out with the tomatoes. As they start to fruit it’s fine to take off lower and excess leaves as well as side shoots.
They used to grow the tomatoes twisted around twine that was on an angle and lower the twine when the plant got too high. I still remember the smell. And how sticky I used to get from cucumber sap…It was without a doubt, my favourite job.