Eaten a Spanish Tomato Recently?

Chances are that this is where it came from.

http://www.iberianature.com/material/greenhouse_almeria.htm

Grown bedded into loft insulation & fed Hydroponically.

Spanish farmers found that if they could get anything to grow in the harsh conditions then the wind usually killed it. So they tried shielding the plants from the wind with sheets of polythene.

They found that not only did it protect the plants, it also extended the growing season.

Now the area has become Europe's Salad bowl.

 

no ... only eat Portuguese grown vine tomatoes, thank you, usually the cherry or mini plum variety ... yum, yum ...

 

Now the winter season is upon us, we tend to use the tinned variety for stews and spag bol.

 

Never buy Spanish tomatoes, they look nice, big and juicy.
Taste awful and never ripen properly.

I'd rather go without.

Sometimes buy Italian plum tomatoes for cooking.

 

I bought some delicious tomatoes from the market recently. I doubt they were British or Dutch. They were smallish with a very deep red skin, greenish near the top. The calyx was a very pronounced starry-looking one.
I have bought similar tomatoes before, described as Fuerteventura ones. They are well worth eating.

 

We found some organic toms reduced to 25p/pkt at Tescos that were stickered buy 2 get 25 points, so with 'double up' were free (my favourite price). Thought they were of UK origin but who cares at that price .

 

When I was in Tenerife this October , there were vast areas under polythene greenhouses. The plants inside looked quite big - possibly canarian bananas ? Why do they need greenhouses in southern Tenerife , its blooming hot there !

 

Wind again, can kill a plant off. It killed all my Yardlong beans last year. Plus it concentrates CO2, as you know, our plants evolved in an atmosphere where CO2 was far higher than it is today so they can use high levels to grow better.

There are breweries that send the waste CO2 into greenhouses, it triples the crop.

 

I've built my new growbox above my homebrew fermenters and have wondered about putting extension tubes on the airlocks.

 

Excellent idea Scrunge

 

You're half way towards your own private completely functional biome

Just need to sort out water and 'solid waste' recycling and then you're sorted.

 

I can picture the headlines, Gardeners Corner Member colonises Mars

 

I was vaguely aware of this, surely the ingenuity of the collective GC brain can come up with an easy method of concentrating CO2?

A quick search on t'net reveals lots of info on growboxes, usually by people who are particularly interested in one very special sort of crop. (Honestly, if those heads put as much effort into developing a decent straight career as they do into alternative pursuits they'd be running the universe from their starships by now...)

Here's a sensible website for us homely lettuce-growers: I don't think I could be bothered doing all that technical (!) stuff, but for lots of you I'm sure it would be child's play.

http://krstofer.org/plants/clone/

I'd love to be able to strike cuttings more successfully, but not sure I could be doing with all that lot festering away in the spare bedroom. What would the neighbours say? Has anyone tried it? (CO2 cloning, that is. Try not to inhale.)

 

That's exactly what I was thinking of, except my growbox is at a higher level. I'm just becoming familiar with these terms such as 'clones' and 'mother plants and now know that 'all female' isn't necessarily just about cucumbers.

6 galls of wine has approx 6kg of sugar in, of which approx 50% is converted to alcohol and 50% to CO2 and they take about 2 -3 weeks to ferment out, so each fermenter will produce about 1kg of CO2 per week, or about approx 0.5m3 per week according to this useful website I use quite often