Grow Guy

I noticed fine silky webs with red specs on my plants for the first time this morning. A quick look on the interweebs and they are Red Spider Mites! An early sign of these pests is the plant leaves start to turn a speckled yellow or white. This is because spider mites sit on the underside of the leaf and sip the plant fluid removing the chlorophyll. More advanced signs are a silky web appears on the leaves with small red insects and they can cause real damage if left unchecked. There are various ways of dealing with them. One way is to create a humid environment with good airflow which will prevent spider mites from appearing and the other is to use a insect spray. I opted for an organic insect spray made from canola oil and garlic and applied it to the plants but in the future I will try the preventative approach by ensuring good airflow and humidity.

More about spider mites:

• They like courtyards where the climate is hot and dry, if you have a greenhouse in the courtyard they like than even better.
• They like plants that are placed up against the wall where airflow is restricted.
• Can hatch in as little as 3 days. 
• Become sexually mature in as little as 5 days.
• Can live between 2 and 4 weeks laying 200 eggs a day. 
• One female can lay up to 20 eggs per day and can live for 2 to 4 weeks, laying hundreds of eggs.
• Accelerated reproductive rate allows spider mite populations to adapt quickly to resistent pesticides.

My tomatoes are ripening enough for me to pick a couple every two days. The sizes vary but they are a good round shape, have a nice smooth skin, and they taste great! I have not had any issues with bugs and the mildew seems to be under control. The plants are still producing new leaves and I am trimming off the dead leaves as they dry out. There are a couple of things that I will change in the system next time but overall I am happy. I think I placed the buckets to close together which I think might have an effect on the amount of fruit that is produced but I willI keep a record of the daily harvest and I will post the figures once the plants have stopped producing fruit. I probably could have been more aggressive with the grow solution but I will only know once someone tells me if the plants underproduced or not?

I noticed that a couple of my tomatoes are finally turning red and rippening. I am actually going to taste one in the next day or two. The leaves on the lower parts of the stem have started to turn brown and die. I think is the natural growth cycle of the plants because there is new growth on the upper stems of the plants. All of the red fruit is on the lower section of the plants and the higher sections have lots of flowers so I hope that once I pick the ripe fruit some of the nutrients will then start to produce fruit on the rest of the plant.

My tomato plants have come along very nicely, lots of flowers and green fruit. Something that I think is worth a mention is that my reservoir is twenty liters and when the days are hot these four plants can very quickly use up all the solution. This becomes a little more labour intensive in summer when we have loads of hot days in a row. I have been collecting our water from a natural spring some distance away and we also use this as drinking water I have to drive out to refill regularly. I think that two plants to a twenty liter reservoir will be a easier to manage next time. Having two plants to one reservoir will also allow me to grow more varieties and stagger the growth stages.

It is hardly rocket science but I finally have the correct mixtures and the new tomato plants are in the buckets. I bought the fertliser in two parts from the local HortiShop. The fertiliser solution consists of two packets mix A and mix B. Each mixture must be added to its own 5 litre water container. Both mixtures are then added to the reservoir according in amounts according to the plants growth stage.

The starting amounts are 1mm of both mix A and mix B per litre of water which will be stepped up as the plants grow. If you start out with a solution that is two strong you can damage the plant in the early stages. This time round I planted the Floradade Tomato variety this time which I have read is extremely heat tolerant, so they should be better suited to life in my greenhouse.

If you dont already know from my previous post I got my mix wrong and as a result I may have damaged the plants so I decided to start my dutch bucket tomatoes again from scratch. To ensure that I learn the most that I can from each failed attempt I pulled out my current plants and checked their roots. I was surprised to see just how rooted the plants had become and happy to see that there is no algae growth on the roots themselves. That tells me that the system is keeping any unwanted sunlight away from the grow solution limiting the growth of algae, that's a good thing. The roots were warmer than I had expected so as soon as I get a thermometer I will start to keep and eye on the temperature around the roots. I read that the ideal water temp is between 18 and 27 degrees C which I am sure my reservoir falls between because it is always cool to the touch. Hopefully getting new seedlings in the next day or two.

After seeing one of Bobby's how to videos on MHPGardner on Dutch Bucket Tomatos I decided to make my very own dutch buckets. This is a 4 bucket system that I built so that I can learn more about hydroponics and growing my own food. The dutch bucket system is an active system meaning that the nutrient solution is automatically delivered to the plants. The plants then take what they need and the rest of the solution drains back to the reservoir to be reused. The constant recycling will cause the pH of the nutrient to fluctuate so it needs to be monitored often.

I used four 10 liter black builders buckets which I painted white on the outside. The white helps keep the temperature low by reflecting sunlight while the black interior reduces your chances of algae. I then used some irrigation piping, pvc piping and elbows along with grommets to reduce any water loss to deliver the nutrient to and from the reservoir. I am also using a small 5v pond pump which sits inside my 20 liter reservoir. Currently this is working off power but eventually I would like to power the pump via a small solar panel. I am use a 50/50 mix of perlite and vermiculite as a grow medium covered by some pebbles to reduce water loss to evaporation. To further reduce water loss I have pushed the feeder pipes below the surface of the pebbles.

When the water returns to the reservoir it drops between 15cm and 20cm which is how I am hoping to get around using air stones. I have the system running on a timer which turns on and off at various times throughout the day.

You can definitely make a cheaper system than what I made that will perform just as well.

My tomato plants have just not been experiencing the kind of growth that I had expected due to the fact that I misunderstood how to mix the grow solution. I bought two mixes one is mix A which I thought was for flowering plants and the other was mix B which I thought was for leafy plants. Visiting the HortiShop this morning confirmed that equal parts of BOTH solutions needed to be added per liter, only providing mix A will result in poor growth and yellow leaves as can be seen in my photos. Mix A and mix B can not be mixed together in their powder form because they react with one another.