Other undercover growing?

yeah that ring culture method is good, but by deep planting you can pack in more trusses - in my mind anyway it's all about getting the first truss low down so you end up with lots more trusses before the plants hit the roof or needed stopping. Also deep planting need less watering, the ring culture idea you need to water every day (all in my humble opinion of course! )

 

I've not seen those before Kristen, is that a water reservoir? If so I guess it might be worth buying, the root ball looks really good and the plant growing on the right is very healthy. Not a bad result for gro-bags.

 

Thanks for explaining Kristen, I thought it might be something clever for the money, I'll give it a miss at that price.

 

That doesn't look so good Kristen, the tomato plant looks poorly - not a great advert.

 

I do deeper planting nowadays but don't use the growbags. As I buy lots of compost it works out much cheaper to use that than the grow bags. The cheap compost (Wickes) doesn't have the small amount of nutrition that growbags have so need feeding more.

Re propagators: I posted this on another thread about them. As I am most definitely not a handyman I still found it easy and cheap to build. I used a heating cable that came with a thermostat control, some chipboard, plastic sheet and gravel.

"I'm not very good as a handyman but didn't find it difficult but almost certainly didn't use the correct materials. Mine is 5ft x 3ft. The base and the sides are made of cheap laminated chipboard (sides are 9" shelving) and I lined them with heavy duty plastic. I then put in 4" of course gravel, drilled a hole at that level to put the sensor through, screwed the control box to the outside of the front, laid the heating cable on top of the gravel and then put approx 2" of fine gravel over the cable.

I then made a very simple but not very professional cover that took me about 15 minutes. I inserted 1" x 1" uprights in the gravel, in the corners and the middle of the sides and pinned them there. Then put a roofing tack in the top of each upright, ran some lightweight wire around the tacks to make a wire perimeter and across from one side to the other. Pinned some lightweight clear plastic (with drawing pins) to the two uprights in the back corners and draped it over the side and front uprights and wires. To get to the inside of the propagator I just simply rolled the plastic back.

Total time to make it - about two hours. Cost was negligible apart from the heating cable and control (£30 in 1976). It is still working well

I don't have the uprights or plastic top anymore as Oscar the cat has his home in the corner. "
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