Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Our hydroponic tomatoes flowering and forming fruit this morning .

what hydroponic mix are you feeding them ?

do those buckets outflow like your cucumber ones ?

Have you had much issue with fruit fly ?
I have fruit fly and chillis getting hit by fruit fly this year (south perth).

I blend my own fertiliser now as buying it from a hydroponic store is too expensive .
A friend put me on to a web link that has a guide .

http://scienceinhydroponics.com/2010/07 ... nners.html

The initial outlay is high but then you have a lot of fertiliser , and can adjust the blend to suit your own needs/thoughts .

The system is the same as the cucumbers yes , recirculating dutch buckets I suppose . The sump tank is a 47 litre storage container .

We have Mediterranean fruit fly for certain , never been an issue with our vegetables . It is an issue with our orange tree , so I treat the fly with a mix of splash baiting , bait stations and cover spraying as recommended by the Ag Dept . The oranges are almost ready .





I don't grow food to feed to bugs , they can bugger off .

very cool set up.

I'll have to read up on this technique. Thank you for sharing!

Here's more detail of the basic construction .
I use plastic 20 litre drums with the tops cut off that I find or source off gumtree free .
Fit a 19 mm threaded take off barb to the tap location , and plumb the outfall to a 40 mm return pipe to the sump .
Theres around 10 mm of water below the fitting at all times depending on the shape of the drum .
Inside the drum use a net cup up against the drain hole to prevent the grow medium from clogging the hole .
I'm using 12 mm lateritic pea gravel as a grow medium as its cheap , stable and inert once washed .

The hydroponic solution is pumped all day , and a few times at night on a timer .



The drums are different heights as I was using some for storage cubes in my shed and were cut to suit the shelving .




Brian

Brian

Simple as simple can get.

I, use Shipley's Square 5 gal buckets with fittings for drip irrigation, but plant 2 Indeterminate tomatoes per bucket.

I, notice from your pictures you don't prune the side branches of your plants, under the lowest truss.

Pretty much the same system then , and I also double plant the pots , and certainly trim off all lateral shoots leaving only one stem per plant , the older leaves I clean up as they die .

I am using just two threaded poly barbs per pot directed down near the plant base to supply the irrigation . That way its easy to see any blockages and clean them . For the end of the line just fold the pipe and push on a ring of PVC pipe , its easy to take off and flush out any solids .

In the commercial GH's, one of the biggest labor intensive jobs is the removal of any branches below the lowest bottom truss.

The food that the tomato plants make only flows down the stem. So those branches are removed. Letting them shrivel and die before removal, is a home for insects, and other diseases. Trimming also helps in the cross flow of air for ventilation.

OP

Do you mean remove the bottom leaves blow the first truss ?
There's no branches below the truss . Yes snipping and pinching out lateral shoots is a daily task here .

Who's going to do that work in the USA once Trump deports the illegals ?

Brian

What variety of tomatoes are they? Seem to like forming lots of flowers

How do tomatoes do over autumn/winter in Perth? Mine are slowing down due to the colder weather.

I can't remember each variety , there are cherry tomatoes ( I think that's the one with the massive umbels of flowers ) Grosse lisse , Roma and a couple other large fruiting types . My wife likes the cherry tomatoes , but then said she now likes the grosse lisse , so I mixed them up .

These went in as punnets in the beginning of March , supposed to be the start of Autumn , but we had days of 38 and 39 C for a couple of weeks . As annuals I expect them to race to finish early , due to the shortening days , and yes the cold will slow them down , I'll warm the water in the tank to 25 degrees . I've seen photos of tomatoes growing over winter .

just need a bit of glass/polycarbonate - I wondered about doing something like Food&Fish did.

he carried tomatoes in Melbourne so we should be ahead on daylight hours.

Yours is a multiflora variety, with that many flowers. I've got some similar, but not that many clusters.

Good luck overwintering them.

Update



Something yello



A single truss of roma toms



Beefsteak ?



Brian

Wowza, looking good!