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Entry Date
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Nick Name
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Location
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Friday, September 04, 2026
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Little Ketchup
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Grittyville, WA
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Entry 257 of 258 |
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Not a MLT mutton lettuce tomato (better than true love) but here just a BST bacon spinach tomato. Bacon-egg-spinach-tomato would be a BEST sandwich :)
Anyhow I just had some thoughts. First, with four melons on it I finally haulted the growth of the Ciesielski melon plant. A pound of melon per sq ft of plant seems like a realistic production target. Flood/ zone irrigation seems likely to be possible. Elevating the vine with the melon might be good. Not sure if pruning the vines would be effective. Straw, or permeable plastic mulch should give good results, perhaps both is the best. Weeds could certainly be an issue. Zone watering half the plant with an oscillating sprinkler or impulse sprinkler might work. Every-other-day zones or an vs pm zone could be good if the soil dries fast and doesn't hold enough water. Keeping part of the plant foliage dry might be beneficial vs getting the entire plant wet. Or drip irrigation or something would keep the whole plant dry at all times. Some humidity in the foliage could be useful in terms of directing calcium into the fruit.
In the pursuit of tomatoes, more straw mulch or plastic mulch could be a humidity barrier, keeping both the foliage and roots happier. The biggest enemy here in the new location seems to be excess foliage, at the expense of fruit. I am not seeing any native pollinators on the tomatoes here which is part of the problem. I'm not sure why the foliage is so rampant and the fruit so lackluster, I dont think it's just a nitrogen issue. Perhaps the roots need more minerals of some sort to boost cytokine output. Perhaps the brix of the plants is too low or transpiration is too high. More humidity might help. I certainly dont see this problem to this degree at my old location. At the old location there seems to be a natural & proportional foliage/fruit balance. Again I do suspect some sort of lack of signaling from the roots as the issue. That would be a soil biology issue or a nutrient issue. More amino acids might help. The foliage and vine tips look anemic yet their growth is still excessive. Iron, in the correct form, could be a limiting factor. Proper utilization of nitrogen could be an issue. It might all come down to maximizing the habitable zone for the right soil biology. Organics is low. Biochar or maybe some straw incorporated into the soil.
I'm trying to think of obvious differences and one such difference is that there are hardly any worms here. At my old location, the worms add so much healthy soil carbon.... they are such a boost to the soil biology. I put layers of leaves out and the leaves disappear into the soil over the winter. The rainwater leaches out a lot of nutrients but the worms keep adding to the soil. So the EC is low but the soil biology is good enough to make up for the low EC / fertility. Tomatoes do seem to want more than just NPK, they do seem to want either a biological or micronutrient component, or both.
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