Today I decided to go ahead and pull my tomato plants from my aerogarden unit. Some good and poor results to chronicle. On the good side, the plants grew extremely well in the unit! Even though I kept prunning them back to keep them under the 24″ high light arm, they exceeded their growth expectations and some vines were up to 3.5 feet in length when I terminated them today. The “same” sister plants that were started in this unit and then transplanted out to my ground garden are much more compact and are probably 2.5 feet tall at their tallest but are covered in blossoms and starting to set fruit.
great root systems
My indoor plants grown in the AeroGarden however only set out a few flowers which resulted in about a dozen fruits. So I conclude that I should have used a different variety of tomato in the first place and needed to adjust the nutrients to a more “bloom” formula. This means I would have used a different companies hydroponic solutions instead of the aerogarden nutrients. Notice how full these roots systems are! The plants really thrived even through the growth was more vegetative rather than fruiting which of course is the object in growing tomatoes!
Still not having to combat bugs and slugs is a definite plus and it’s nice to know that plants like tomatoes can be grown successfully indoors any time of year. I think I will use a “determinate” variety next time. Tomatoes are determinate and indeterminate. Let me clarify:
Determinate refers to tomatoes that bloom all at once and fruit all at once , then are done for the season. This type of tomato is most often stocky, short, and does not require staking. The red and yellow tomatoes in the Aerogarden tomato seed kit are just such a plant and can be grown in the standard size AeroGarden.
Indeterminate refers to tomatoes that “vine”, they set blooms and fruit continuously until they are killed off by frost in autumn months.
So, I will clean up my aerogarden unit, sanitized it, and consider what next to grow in it! Thanks for following along with me on this little gardening adventure!
Joyce
PS: Here is a great short article on how to prune tomatoes. Wish I had read this earlier when I was pruning my plants! Could have made a difference in fruit production I think.
Thank you for sharing your experience with the AeroGarden. I was curious about growing lemon cucumbers in my AeroGarden. Like tomatoes I would need to use a more blossom oriented nutrient. I live in the dessert and am very happy being able to grow salads in my AeroGarden inside while I grow tomatoes and cukes out on my porch.
Comment by Jeri — August 3, 2008 @ 5:14 pm |
Thanks Jeri!
Great to know my “ramblings” are being read. And I agree, lemon cukes definitely vine a lot so growing them outdoors is the way to go. One of my favorite varieties too!
I will probably start tomatoes again in October so I can have fresh tomatoes in January-February. So stop back by this winter and see how it’s going.
Joyce
Comment by virtualseeds — August 3, 2008 @ 5:40 pm |
Thanks for the link to how to prune tomatoes, needs studying in depth. The Aerogarden looks very interesting sounds like it worked well for you. Might need to investigate it myself.
Comment by Rob Wilson — August 15, 2008 @ 9:16 pm |