jadins_jurney

My indoor gardens are taking a break from their primary purpose of growing some MJ, instead of shutting down completely thought I'd grow some veggie's. Well tomoato's & peppers are actually fruits but we'll stick with what they are commonly known as.

The actuall flowering room is still occupied by the girls so the veggies are getting started in another system I have for young plants, surprisingly named my "veg chamber". The tomatos are already set in their pots but I had to bunch the peppers in 2 pots but will seperate the varieties when some more pots are freed up after the girls get harvested.

I do run a seperate herbal garden in my living room. It's something the partner and I do together. It's primrily an herb garden but currently there is a dwarf tomato and a dwarf pepper planted. These two plants are the newest varities offered for the Aerogarden, but why use an Areogarden when I can run 15gl E&F system?

Happy Gardening,

jj

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discingolfer

Tomato Flower Pollination

If flowering is the trickiest part of how to grow tomatoes, than pollination must be the trickiest part of flowering. As soon as flowers develop and begin to open, you must pollinate everyday while it is warm and humid. Ideally, the humidity will be 65 to 70 percent. Greenhouse growers usually do this between 11:30am and 12:30pm (basically noon) when these conditions occur naturally. For them, early and late day pollination often will not produce proper crops.

tomato flower diagram*

This is a tomato flower. Part A is the male anthers that will drop the pollen. Part B is the female carpels that will catch the pollen. The little red arrow is where it all takes place.

Most male anthers produce their pollen on the outsides of the anthers, making it easy to release pollen into the wind for pollination. In the tomato plant, however, pollen is produced internally, as if trapped in a straw. This is the biggest problem for tomato pollination.

The plant needs vibration at the right frequency, such as the buzzing of a bees wings, to dislodge and release the pollen. The best way I have found to do this is to take an electric toothbrush to each support truss and main branch. The more pollen to successfully fertilize the plant, the more seeds will be produced in the fruit (and therefore the meatier the tomato will be).

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unregistered190

looks like a plan jadin have you ever done tomatos before? curious cause i would like to try that sometime. what is your setup of lights, etc?

disc, glad you posted on the pollination...very interesting, a lot of people in my are not getting tomatos this year like they used to...and i thought it might be due to the lack of bees around here.

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jadins_jurney

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jadins_jurney

discingolfer, thanks buddy for the article. We did enjoy reading it and it's part of many things I have to learn in the near future.

unregistered190, thanks for stopping by. Nope, never grown tomatoes indoors before, many crops outside where nature did all the work for me. To tell ya the truth I freaking hate tomatoes, I just want something to grow in the garden. Several of my friends can't wait to make some salsa that's why this grow is Roma tomatos mostly, it's the variety every one asked for. I did throw in 2 pots that have a large cherry bunch variety. The peppers are what I am after from this grow, six varieties in all; 2 sweet varieties chocolate and bell, and 4 HOT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! varities, the hottest being a little fellar named "Biker Mike." Laytex gloves required for handling all 4 varities according to the seed packets.

Lighting for this veggie grow is gettting scaled back from what I am running now, just opened the electric bill OUCH! Re-working the duct work to handle two 1k systems for the flower room, the veg. chamber is a 400MH and the herb garden is a 250MH. So I guess the answer to lighting would be 2.65K. A bit of overkill for growing veggies but that's not what I am building the garden for.

Everything I do in this garden seems to be outside the norm so to speak, figure this veggie grow falls within that aswell.

Happy Gardening,

jj

squirrel_master

i'm lazy. i'll just let the bees do the work.

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and weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

StoneyBee

JJ - nice garden. You will be enjoying the fruits of your labor soon.
discingolfer is right. its sooo much easier to pollinate using a an electric toothbrush or a pollinator. You can hand tap the cluster, but you get pretty poor fruit set.

What are you feeding the kids?

SB

jadins_jurney

The remodel work in the garden is taking a bit longer than expected. Upgrading some fan capacity, changing over to ridgid ducting and stationary lighting fixtures, heck I even painted the walls after removing all the mylar.

The veggies are not liking the delay one bit, the tomatoes are overgrowing everything and the peppers are without a doubt getting root bound.

jj

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jadins_jurney

Slowly but surely it's coming together. My garden's floor is rough poured concrete that has a drop of 4 inchs from it's high point to it's low point. This makes for setting up an E&G system a bit of a challenge since it relies on gravity to transfer water to each pot and not overflow, yes it happened, lots of water before I could shut the system down.

Got the tomatoes transfered last night after leveling out the system. Will finish them up tonight and then work the peppers.

jj

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jadins_jurney

Finished up the frame for the tomatoes, hopefully this will keep the fruit off of the floor if they ever get to that point. I did try and repot one container but that really is not an option with hydroton, the roots are much more brittle than MJ and the plants did not do well.

There is a total of 6 varieties of peppers, each in their own pot. I did plant enough of one variety to have 2 pots of bell peppers for a total of 7 pots of peppers. A couple of varieties are not responding well, showing wrinkled leaves with some lower leaves dropping off. This system has 13 pots currently so there are a few tag-alongs growing with the peppers.

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