Hello folks

I notice this forum isnt very popular. Wonder Why?

I am cheating. Doing the poor mans hydroponics kinda in hydroponic grow bags this year.

I just dont like hydroponic tomatoes. I know they have been tested to be the best in greenhouses but im trying the Big Beef tomatoes in the greenhouse. I love a real tomato taste.

here are tomatoes in hydroponic grow bags. Using Mittleider poor man hydroponic method.
This pic is from Mar 5th. They are looking much better now. Will up date pic later.

CricketsTomato,

"I notice this forum isnt very popular. Wonder Why?"

I really don't know. But Jim Kennard was one of the most active and knowledgeable contributors and his wife Eleanor passed away last September and understandably his participation here was affected by that. I was inspired by Jim's contributions in the subject area of "the poor man's hydroponics" using the Mittleider Method of intensive gardening.

I think only a small percentage of gardeners practice "pure" hydroponics. That may explain the relative inactivity here. But I think a lot of gardeners can benefit from hydroponic technology, as in the Mittleider Method.

Last year I raised a lot of seedling indoors under overdriven fluorescent lights and grew them fairly large before setting them out. Some had reached the blooming stage. My growing medium was Premier ProMix BX with some added Perlite and I used soluble nutrients such as Miracle-Gro and Peters African Violet Food. There is some calcium in the ProMix, but not a lot, and after a couple of months I began to see calcium deficiency symptoms in my plants. I sprinkled on some plaster of paris with some success.

None of the soluble nutrients I was using contained calcium even though it is really a macronutrient and not a micronutrient. Calcium is the weak spot in most commercial soluble nutrient products. This year I ordered some calcium nitrate from a hydroponics supply place and I will be using it to prevent the calcium deficiency in my seedlings this year. So my gardening will be benefiting from hydroponics even though I do not practice it as such.

MM

Yeh I too noticed there wasnt much calcium in the nutrients for growing tomatoes. I have had a hard time finding instant calcium. I have some lime but it wont do the the plants any good for a couple of months. At the same time lime raises pH and i dont need to raise my ph at this point. It needs to be lowered. Magnesium and Zink lowers pH so im hoping this epsom salt will do the trick. Then again---later on the pH maybe too low. Gonna be fun controling my soil balance.
I use promix-bx too for my flats of bedding and vegetables that I sale. Thats good stuff.
I didnt fertilize my plants very much before I put them in the grow bags so they were slightly pale. We had a lot of rainy days and rainy days cause stretching and fertilizer would have made it worse. So now i need to get those babies in tip top shape.
Mar 5 close up pic.

CT,

My order from the hydroponics house came today. They had to back order my ammonium nitrate but I got 3 pounds of calcium nitrate, 2 pounds of potassium nitrate, 1 pound of mono potassium phosphate, and 1 pound of ammonium phosphate. That much should last me for a while.

I am watering my onion seedlings today with dilute calcium nitrate and a little magnesium nitrate mixed in. I don't have much magnesium nitrate, so I will probably run out of it fairly fast. I may be able to substitute magnesium sulfate, but I heard that the sweetest onions (such as the Vidalia onions) are grown in low-sulfur soil. Hence the magnesium nitrate.

You are much farther south than I am, so you are many weeks ahead of me. I haven't even planted tomato seeds yet, but this week I probably will plant some peppers and eggplants. They seem to grow slower than tomatoes.

MM

Your right --peppers and eggplant do grow slower than tomatoes. I like to start my eggplant and peppers 2-3 weeks ahead of my tomatoes. I didnt get to do that this time---there is only 1 week differance this year. Only cause the seeds came in late. So gotta make sure i order earlier next year.
I picked up some Calcium Nitrate yesterday. 5 pounds.
The instructions say to put 1 teaspoon per plant ( any plant that needs calcium). So by the end of this week I'll give the maters some calcium. I think they need it now due to low calcium causing low boric deffiency. A few tomato plants have yellow leaves on tips. Not bad though. But then again , I just fertilized them with mittleider mixture. So Maybe that will help them out.

Isnt there 16 teaspoons in a cup? and A Cup is one pound? If so----I better go buy more calcium cause I have 480 tomato plants . I'll need 30 pounds of calcium every two weeks if there is 16 teaspoons per pound.
ekes.

CT,

That teaspoon of calcium nitrate should be dissolved in one gallon of water before you apply it. Tossing on a teaspoon of raw calcium nitrate could potentially burn and kill any plant tissue it came in direct contact with. If you don't want to apply liquid nutrients, you could sprinkle the calcium nitrate thinly on the soil well away from the plant stem. That practice is sometimes referred to as "side dressing." It isn't totally without hazards, since the concentrated fertilizer could burn any plant roots that are near the surface.

"...and a Cup is one pound?"

Strictly speaking, we shouldn't confuse volume measures with weight measures. So the question of whether a cup is a pound isn't directly answerable, since a cup is a unit of volume and a pound is a unit weight. The weight of a cup of material would depend on the density of the material.

"Isn't there 16 teaspoons in a cup?"

No, there are 16 tablespoons in a cup. So there would be 48 teaspoons in a cup. Which reduces your calculated requirement for calcium. Incidentally, in the garden you don't need to limit yourself to calcium nitrate. Garden grade gypsum, which is calcium sulfate, is an economical source of calcium. Gypsum helps improve soil texture as well. I am using calcium nitrate indoors because it is so soluble. Incidentally, my onion plants are liking it and growing rapidly. I just raised their fluorescent lights by three chain links because they were touching the lights again.

Outdoors in the garden I also use some "lawn lime" which is a purified grade of dolomitic limestone. It consists of a mixture of calcium carbonate and magnesium carbonate. Although the lawn lime I buy from Home Depot is labelled "granulated" it is actually more of a white powder. I sprinkle it around lightly by hand from a bucket or a big coffee can. It is cheap and helps the soil. Snails and slugs don't like it, so it has some limited value for repelling them. I don't use it excessively because it does raise the pH of the soil somewhat.

MM

This message was edited Mar 16, 2005 3:06 PM

thanks for all that information.
I do have a bag of garden lime. But was planning on adding it to the grow raised beds that i build this year . The tomatoes are in 5 gallon grow bags----same as 5 gallon bucket. I now have 2 inches of mulch on the tomatoes and will side dress the tomatoes 3 inches from the plant . Thats what the calcium bag said to do.
nice to know my calculations were wrong. Guess ill see how many cups are in the 5 pound bag of calcium.
thanks a bunch.

cricket