Hello my fellow gardening enthusiasts.

It's time for another update from my outdoor hydroponics garden. My last update was 15 days ago and since then the plants have matured nicely and are providing quite an abundance of food for us. At this time the vines are strong and healthy with only a few nuisance pests every so often on the leaves, but nothing major to speak of.

Climstar 'Smooth Cluster' Tomatoes along the side fence trellis.

As you can see in the top image, my tomato vines are suspended by a cross beam and hang down on hemp string lines supported by vine clips. This year, the Better Bush plant is putting a lot more weight than other vines in the past so I added a piece of 1"x2" as a vertical brace to support it just in case. As I mentioned in my last post, this is the first time I am growing this 'determinate' variety in hydroponics and it has become massive in size and loaded with tomatoes.

Left: Better Bush 'Ugly' Hybrid ~||~ Right: Climstar 'Smooth Cluster'

I also use heavy-gauge zip-ties to create loops around the beam as a fail-safe in case the strings ever break. So each vine is primarily supported by the hemp string and clips, and also by a zip-tie loop and clip. I have a close-up picture showing this below.

There are now 6 main stems on this plant with 78 tomatoes at various stages of ripening and 12 more flower clusters mixed in. This plant is definitely a beast. I am currently rooting 3 offshoot branches I but off last week to make sure I keep this one going.

Support Lines and Vine Clips on Better Bush 'Ugly' Hybrid Tomatoes

The other varieties are doing just as well. The cherry tomato vines are draped in long clusters, mostly doubles for some odd reason, but I will talk about this in another post this week.

As I drop the vines, I clip the clusters to the main stems along the way to keep them safe and out of the way. The process of dropping the vines is slow going and takes about 2 hours to complete as I carefully do this one at a time. I do this once a week as they grow up past the main support beam. The process is more complicated than it should be due to the small space I am growing in out front, but it's something that has to be done.

SuperSweet Cherry Tomatoes, Shows the vines dropped.

I tried to get a good picture from behind the vines to show how I loop the vines back up along the fence as I drop them in the front. Given the confines space, coiling the stems around like you would a lasso or extension cord is the only way to safely place them out of the way without kinking or snapping them (Because that would suck!).

View of the vines dropped and curled up in the back.

In my next gardening post I will discuss the oddity of having mostly double or triple clusters growing in my garden this year. Something I have never experienced before in my past 5 years of hydroponics gardening.

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🌱 Happy Gardening!

Side Note: As I start to expand to other platforms, I needed to evolve my username to be more generic. You will see me start to use "PowerPics" more often and move away from "SteemPowerPics" as I need to drop the "Steem" from my name.