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| | | Home»Hydroponic Tomatoes - II |
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| | Hydroponic Tomatoes -II
Plant Spacing
It is very important to have the correct spacing per plant to prevent lack of light resulting in “leggy” plants that will not yield highly. 3.5 - 4.0 square feet of floor area per plant is required by tomatoes. Space the rows and plants within the rows to obtain that area per plant. With rockwool slabs place the slabs in a single row separated by 7 inches between the ends. The single rows should be 6 feet apart. By locating 5 plants/slab the area per plant is 4.2 square feet. If you are using Bato buckets with perlite, locate the pots alternating on each side of the drain pipe at 16-inch centers along the pipe and 6 feet between rows. With two plants per pot the area per plant will be about 4.0 square feet.
Training
As soon as the seedlings are transplanted into their final growing system, rockwool or perlite, etc. training must begin. It is very important to train your plants correctly in order to maximize your production. As mentioned above, we use staking varieties of tomatoes, so they must be trained vertically. Support the plants from strings attached to overhead wires that can be attached to hooks in the ceiling or use a supporting frame above to tie the strings. The string is unwound until it reaches the base of the plant where it is attached to the plant under a strong leaf by a plastic plant clip.
Pollination
Pollination is an important part of the everyday training of your plants in order to get tomato production. Pollination in a commercial greenhouse is achieved by use of bumble bees but the best way to do it in a home is to use an electric toothbrush. Simply place the toothbrush behind the truss vibrating it for 3 to 4 seconds. Do this in the late morning or early afternoon when humidity levels in the air will be lower. Flowers are receptive when their sepals bend back. You can tap the flowers with your hand and see the fine pollen fall. Placing a piece of black paper behind will permit you to better see the flow of pollen.
Crop Cycle
It takes about 100 days from seeding to first fruit harvest in case of tomatoes. After that they will continue to produce fruit, but yields will fall once the plants reach 10 to 11 months in age. Depending upon the yield, once they stop bearing fruit well or the size of fruit is becoming small, it would be better to change the crop to get more vigorous plants. Cropping period for two crops per year is of about 5 months each. Start the seedlings for the new crop 5 weeks prior to your anticipated time of removing the old crop to reduce the crop turn around period to two months.
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