That was actually a difficult question to answer, because I’ve visited a few tomato production facilities in China that produce far more tomatoes than traditional farmland operations 🤷🏼♀️
by ImpressiveShock2159
That was actually a difficult question to answer, because I’ve visited a few tomato production facilities in China that produce far more tomatoes than traditional farmland operations 🤷🏼♀️
by ImpressiveShock2159
11 Comments
Honestly, both can work great, it really depends more on care, sunlight, and consistency than the setup itself.
More soil volume is always better in my experience. Those extremely controlled environments where you see Chinese Hot House tomatoes are probably the exception not the rule — extremely careful attention paid to nutrients and watering. For me as a home gardener my raised bed does better than felt pots likely because I’m lazy about watering honestly, but also the raised bed soil is probably more alive and active with microbial activity. But these dwarfs in the picture look really nice.
I grew 150lbs in about 25 – 3.5 and 5 gal buckets last year.
It depends on the weather. Containers are better when it is colder, and ground plants do better in the hot summer. Root zone temp is key.
Everything grows better for me in ground. Containers dry out too fast and get hydrophobic for me.
in ground, my tomatoes grow under the same condition grow 2-3 times bigger in ground than the 7 gallon bags I use, and produce way more fruits.
Hydroponic DWC, ground, container in that order in my experience.
In ground all the way baby! Although, I
must admit we ran out of our in ground spots and have 8 more tomatoes in bags (23 total). We’ve had a great time planting and expanding our garden this year 🌺
I’m having a positive experience with my micros in pots this year.
I’m pretty sure I’ve settled on there being an infestation of Surinam cockroaches in my soil in the ground. They feed on plant roots, which would go some ways to explain the slower growth in ground vs pots.
I have one regular indeterminate plant in a pot too so will be interested to see how it compares. At the moment it’s behind those in the ground, but I didn’t up pot it until much later than I planted out.
Comparing what you can do at home with a production facility doesn’t make much sense. They will have a custom nutrient mix that they pump daily so even if there is some soil the plant is operating as if it were hyroponic.
I think it is common to underestimate just how far roots.go. many times the size of the plant. Or they want to.