Uhh, Houston, we have a problem. We, uhh, sort of fixed some problems and now we have newer, bigger problems. Please advise.
A week or so ago, we dove into some of our most important posts of the season where we discussed pH and fertilizers. It’s the cumulation of all the learning we’ve done, as advanced gardeners, over this last winter. We made some significant changes to our practice as a result of that research, relating to pH and nutrition. And let’s just say that we’ve found ourselves ill equipped to deal with the consequences of our improved results.
We’ve been growing tomatoes for a long time. We’ve also been growing tomatoes in our greenhouse for seven seasons now. We know what to expect, almost to a T. At least, that is, until this season. Our problem, this year? We’re an entire month ahead of schedule!
We used to never be really worried about our tomato plants reaching the ceiling of our greenhouse. Typically, this happens in late July. And, by August 1, we’re topping our tomato plants anyway. This is a northern technique we use to force the tomato plant to focus on maturing fruit. We give them nowhere to grow and nothing else to do than to pump up and mature fruit.
But, here we are at the beginning of July, with two thirds of our growing season left and we are having this problem. We “fixed the glitch” with minor nutritional availability issues and unlocked an entirely new set of problems!
Our most obvious (and only) option at this point is to perform some last minute, emergency trellising. Or just let the chips fall how they may. We really just need to get to three weeks from now, as any flowers that aren’t yet pollinated at that point are not going to be in the running for tomatoes we can harvest, anyway. But, our problem is that some of our plants are putting on a foot a week and that’s “a lot of plant” to fit into the remaining space! One thing’s for sure, we’re gonna find out!
These are obviously “good problems to have,” but we wouldn’t be authentic if we weren’t demonstrating the very real issues you have to contend with as gardeners. Even as experienced gardeners, we are constantly observing and reacting to what our plants are doing. And sometimes, they do things far beyond our expectations and we just have to figure it out as we go.
We’re cumulating many thoughts and ideas to bring into winter. A big part of what we’re doing is changing variables, one by one, and I’m really starting to think we hit some key things this year. The evidence I have is all around us, we’re seeing similar performance gains across all our plants at our home gardens.
We’ll try to talk a bit more about the changes we made, too, as I’m sure it’s got some of you really curious at this point. We’ve done a couple other minor things to our practice, too, and I know some of you actually listen to us and want to learn what we know.
