OK, let’s chat about outdoor grown tomatoes. We dialed up our experimentation to 11 this year, just to see if we could reinvent the wheel.
We’ve always tried to be honest with you all. The primary, and practically only, reason that we built our own greenhouse was for our tomatoes. We pitted ourselves against trying to grow tomatoes outdoors in our early days, we didn’t have a choice. And we’ve always tried to level with you. It’s hard. Your primary product at the end of the season is green tomatoes.
Now, we got pretty good at ripening tomatoes off the vine, using naturally produced ethylene to finish out the actual ripening. But, as former growers in more favorable latitudes, it just isn’t the same as vine ripened outdoor grown tomatoes. We’d get an OK harvest, but the greenhouse was 100% the key to a better one.
Well, this year, we’ve found ourselves back in the fight. We grew ten tomato plants of various varieties outdoors, all hydroponically. Our logic was this method provides extremely elevated access to NPK and a generally warm root system. We’re also watching the professionals. If you know where grocery tomatoes come from, it’s northern greenhouses (primarily in Canada) and they’re grown hydroponically.
Well, our earliest of results are now in. For this method to be “worthy,” we determined we needed to see initial ripening at the 60 day point. We’re just barely there. In most soil based and outdoor grown tomatoes, we’re usually pushing 75 days for our first ripening. So, we’re definitely seeing a difference.
Comparing this outdoor grow to our greenhouse is not a fair contest. In our greenhouse, we’ve been getting ripe tomatoes for weeks now and have fully passed the threshold where we can keep up with production with just our fresh eating habits. But, we know a lot of you are still fighting this fight. So, we had to dial it up to 11, just to see if we could improve performance at all.
I do think we’ll need to revisit this experiment with you all, closer to our first frosts. Maybe provide you with some net weights or something from our outdoor plants. It’s one thing to get a slightly ripe tomato, it’s another to have a bounty of beautiful red beauties. But, we’re on track with some extremely mature and rather large tomatoes that are on the verge of popping any day now.
As usual, we’re seeing a lot of difference across varieties. Our Stupice variety is coming in first, just as it always did in our early outdoor growing days. Curiously, the maturity levels match our greenhouse ripening almost identically, just about 2-3 weeks behind. If this pattern and the weather keep up, we might be able to pull in a decent bounty.
We can definitely tell our outdoor grown tomatoes are a lot more hardy. There’s something to be said about tomatoes that have to deal with the elements. The stalks are thicker, the clusters are larger and heavier and the leaves look like they’re ready for anything. Whereas our greenhouse tomatoes look like they never had a hard day in their life. Which is true, but it’s a curious observation.
Anyway, let us know if you want to hear more about this experiment. We figured this was a good point to give you all an update, but we might finish it out with “final thoughts” just to let you know how much of an edge we really think using hydroponics outdoors might provide.
