1000 Plant Heirloom Container Grow
 

Planting 33 Varieties of Heirloom Tomatoes this season.

Seeds are being ordered this week.

Here are my preliminary plans, any input would be awesome.

I'm buying 3 Cases of 400 5 Gallon Grow Bags for about $300.00 Total.

I was trying to calculate the cost of building Raised bed gardens and I couldn't justify the expense even If I built them all from pallets.

My soil is rocky, covered in weeds and slightly clay like. I may still consider amending and tilling the soil but I really feel like containers are the way to go for this first round.

My calculations.

5 Gallon Containers x 1000 = 5000 Gallons of soil

202 gallons per yard of soil so I need about 25 yards.

My local soil place will custom mix me a landscaping or planting mix to my liking for $25-$35 per yard depending on the final mix choice.

Thats about $750 plus $75 Delivery.

Let's figure $1,000 Dollars for the soil.

About $300 For the Containers

$300 For the seed varieties.

So Far, I'm liking the 5 Gallon Container Idea as it should also help conserve water.

If I can get my mix hot enough I will only be feeding with Aerated Earth Worm Compost Tea + some other simple organic nutrients. And I already have these supplies.

I have a Large workshop and lot's of indoor lights that I am going to start at least 250 of the plants indoors really early, hopefully seeds will be popping in about 2 weeks.

I'm going to build a deer fence in a huge square on my property and fill the inside with 33 rows of plants. I'll be covering the ground with Hay as a mulch to keep weeds out and also give the tomatoes something to rest on.

I have lot's of wind so I will let the plants just sprawl on the ground.

I'm in Colorado and the season is short, so getting everything started now is huge for me.

Does anyone think I'm crazy to use 5 Gallon Containers x 1000?

Any advice on my soil mix?

I've got LOT's more reading to do.

Thanks for reading! 8-)

I think you might want to go with slightly bigger for some of the larger, indeterminate varieties. Otherwise, soil might get depleted and dry out too quickly, as well as not be heavy enough to hold them in a wind. Letting them sprawl on the ground might work, but some staking might be better, especially if you're dealing with critters snacking - and that includes deer.

I have been known to have up to 160 pots/containers going at one time. Although I have grown tomatoes in 5 gallon pots, I try to reserve those ones for the determinate or the ones that are shorter ones/suitable for containers. I prefer the 7 to 10 gallon size, but also have some 20 to 50 gallon size that I'll put multiple plants in. The larger ones will end up holding the moisture longer....so unless you want to set up a self-watering system or an irrigation system, you're going to be out there hand watering or using a hose...allot....with those 5 gallon pots.

Just MHO. Hope that helps. But sounds like you've thought through the costs. Are you planning on marketing the produce? That seems like allot of plants/pots.

Zana

Zana

You might want to go to the container thread and look at the grow bag again thread. It 5 pages. Caroyln Phillips is growing alot of tomatoes in 5 gall. grow bags. You might get some ideas from that thread on where to start and what to do.

I'd also make sure you would be receiving a soil-less potting mix, not a mix intended to go in the ground.

I have tried sprawling. My advice would be to do the Florida Weave and perhaps reduce the number of plants to compensate for the cost of the staking system. You lose a ton of productivity letting them sprawl (my opinion only). Sprawling also takes up a much larger space...you can pack many more plants in if you stake.

[QUOTE=recruiterg;257167]I'd also make sure you would be receiving a soil-less potting mix, not a mix intended to go in the ground.

I have tried sprawling. My advice would be to do the Florida Weave and perhaps reduce the number of plants to compensate for the cost of the staking system. You lose a ton of productivity letting them sprawl (my opinion only). Sprawling also takes up a much larger space...you can pack many more plants in if you stake.[/QUOTE]

Lots of good tips here. I agree with the space and productivity reduction with sprawling.

Thanks Everyone! I'll be looking at larger containers for some of the plants.... but not 100% sure yet. I don't mind watering twice daily.

I really don't like soilless mixes and don't want to add nutrients all the time but with 5 gallons I'm sure it would be fairly often anyhow.

Okay... now I'm thinking again. I love the input. I'll update my thoughts later today.

Check with landscape companies in new subdivisions or even new condo complexes....I scored about 50 20gal heavy black plastic pots when they planted all the new trees in our complex (brand new complex).....for FREE! They were just going to toss them in the recycle bin....go figure. Also check with places like ToysRUs that sell those round bins with rope handles for kids toys. I drilled holes in the ones I picked up for under $10 a piece....in fact found them at a local Home Hardware for $7 a piece and they're more like about 40gal and heavier plastic, so can leave them out all year round....and with the handles if you have to lift them when filled its easier...or at least drag them. LOL

Zana

I have always seen it recommended that soilless mix, or at least sterile mix, be used in containers. I believe there is a chance of disease if you put garden soil in containers.
Also it is too heavy and cakes up? As for adding nutrients, you can add slow release fertilizer granules into the mix when you plant, or include the fertilizers in your water.

What types of containers are you planning on using? What are they made of?

I do a mix depending upon how large a container, but mostly soilless mix, compost and lots of vermiculite.

+2 on the container mix. If you get the mix "right" you're going to solve most of your problems before they arise. Unless you're growing in a greenhouse, or in a climate with virtually no precipitation (in other words, growing in a situation where you are completely in control of the amount of irrigation) you're going to need a well-aerated substrate. Mixes comprised of significant portions of compost, topsoil and other amendments typical of in-ground production are going to be way too heavy for containers. That said, since you're using organic fertility, you'll want to add a small amount of humus or compost - I'd keep it at around 10% or less. In the past, I've used a 5-1-1 mix of pine bark fines, peat, and perlite. This year, I'm using a 8-1-1-1 mix of pine bark fines, peat/humus, Turface (a calcined clay product) and perlite. The exact recipe isn't of primary importance - it can be tweaked to suit your local conditions and availability of material.

[QUOTE=fortyonenorth;257185]+2 on the container mix. If you get the mix "right" you're going to solve most of your problems before they arise. Unless you're growing in a greenhouse, or in a climate with virtually no precipitation (in other words, growing in a situation where you are completely in control of the amount of irrigation) you're going to need a well-aerated substrate. Mixes comprised of significant portions of compost, topsoil and other amendments typical of in-ground production are going to be way too heavy for containers. That said, since you're using organic fertility, you'll want to add a small amount of humus or compost - I'd keep it at around 10% or less. In the past, I've used a 5-1-1 mix of pine bark fines, peat, and perlite. This year, I'm using a 8-1-1-1 mix of pine bark fines, peat/humus, Turface (a calcined clay product) and perlite. The exact recipe isn't of primary importance - it can be tweaked to suit your local conditions and availability of material.[/QUOTE]

Thanks for the advice. I'll be Mixing the "Soil" with about 30-40% topsoil and then I will use lot's of bark and other organic amendments. So it will be mostly soilless. But all this talk has got me thinking....

Still no decisions... and I'm at work.

So tonight I'll post on here my Full Thoughts and share more insight as to how I will be selling the tomatoes and also feeding the tomatoes.

If you are going to use a top soil you are going to have to hand amend it. I too got compost mixed top soil from a company for my raised garden bed. They do not add enough compost for a container type situation. Top soil that will work in an open field will not work in a container. The roots are not able to hold the water very well and there can be problems with oxygen when you use plastic bags. You will have to lighten up the mix a lot to overcome these issues. Are you raising these to sell at market? If you are you will have a hard time watering that many plants twice a day and working a farmers market. Good luck.

The cost of deer fencing is not insignificant. 8' is necessary if you don't use electricity. Or 2 fences 2-4' apart.
They sure do love to jump!

Not to be throwing too big a wet blanket on your plans, which are noble in intention to be sure...

I do hope you're factoring in labor somewhere in there, right at the very beginning.

Example: 1000 plants/60 = Any process that takes exactly 1 minute per plant, including moving on to the next plant = ~16 1/2 hours to perform the process on all of them. Leading to the next questions, how many times a week are you going to have to perform processes X, Y, and Z?

In the best case scenario, oodles and oodles of ripe tomatoes, at the very least you're going to have to hire somebody to help you with[I] picking [/I]them. I'm sure many here can back me up on this: the most labor-intensive part of a successful smallish-scale gardening operation is harvesting.

The watering part of a grow-bag operation needs to be strategized well. Our smallish meetinghouse garden has used a moderately expensive (i.e. capital-intensive) drip irrigation system, which failed to keep up with last summer's heat wave, but which works surprisingly well in cooler weather. All along, I've favored a more traditional "raised-sunken" bed system, sometimes referred to as a "waffle bed," with shallow-trench irrigation. For each bed, you put the hose end in the highest part of the trench, fill up the trench and then turn down the water pressure until the amount soaking into the soil = the amount coming out of the house, and that's what I call "deep watering." Works amazingly well in warm dry climates for tomatoes: as the top layers of the soil dry (hopefully mulched plenty well enough they don't dry out all that quickly,) you're basically telling the plant roots, "there's still water down deeper, come and get it." So the roots do exactly that.

Each bed only needs deep watering once or twice a week, for maybe about 1-3 hours per watering, even in the driest of times, once the roots have reached a certain depth. Building the trenches and little mini-dykes that enclose the bed takes X amount of time, maybe twice as much as setting up a drip system. Keeping the trenches free of silt and debris blockage takes very little time. Weeding takes very little time if you pull up most of your weeds by hand as soon as you can in the spring. And maybe do some companion planting with a few fairly shallow-rooted buddies that the tomatoes will get along with; basil, for instance.

The point being, once your dykes and trenches are in place, watering consists of: moving the hose from bed to bed; turning it on' turning it down; turning it off. Easy as pie.

Jack Nicholson's garden in "The Missouri Breaks" was quite an inspiration to me-- but really, it's just one version of the way people have always grown things in the American West. Very similar to what I've described here.

Grow bags? Well, if they don't dry out [I]too[/I] quickly in your climate, that just might work well for you. You would do well to ask around in Montrose, including calling up your USDA extension office, and see what others in your vicinity have experienced with grow bags.

[QUOTE=MileHighGuy;257118]I was trying to calculate the cost of building Raised bed gardens and I couldn't justify the expense even If I built them all from pallets. [/QUOTE]

It's possible to make raised beds without walls. In [I]The New Victory Garden[/I], the late Bob Thomson describes how he makes his raised beds.

"All my Victory Garden raised beds are 48 inches wide, and most are 8 feet long. ....To make the beds themselves, I use my rake to form the soil between the paths into a flat-topped mound about 8 inches high, with a base width of 48 inches and sides that taper up at about a 48-degree angle to a top that's 36 inches wide......when I'm finished I have raised beds that will last the whole growing season. Once created, these raised beds need only minor reshaping with the rake at the beginning of each season."

[I]The New Victory Garden[/I], 1987

The soil at my community garden is swamplike with no drainage, so everyone builds raised beds...and they are just long rectangular piles of soil. Raised beds may take less labor for setup--and tear down--and would fit with your plan of using part topsoil.

augiedog55's suggestion to check out the "grow bag again" thread in the container forum is a great one. I just read through it and there is a wealth of experience from people who are actively growing in bags.
[URL]http://www.tomatoville.com/showthread.php?t=21162[/URL]

Edited to say: Whoops, I mean people who are actively growing [I]tomatoes [/I]in bags.

MileHighGuy, in order to help us better inform you, please tell us what is your area of expertise: Small business set-up or tomato growing?

My Area of Expertise is in Business and Sales.

I however have lot's of gardening and farming experience.

I've always built business's and taken jobs related to the income. Now at the ripe old age of 28, I've decided that I'll do what I love to do and not worry about the money. I make enough now to cover my small expenses... I have no kids and very little to worry about.

I've grown hundreds of Tomato plants and many in containers... but I always used a bagged Organic Soil or Soilless Mix that was amended.

My Weakness is this years project will be the quantity of plants.

I'm being forced to think differently about the entire Project due to expenses and Time.

I'm not concerned If I lose my entire investment, but I know that I will succeed because I always find a way.

[B]Right now my top priority is the type of soil mix that I'm going to use. Once that is decided I'll be relieved.[/B]

If I waited until I knew all the answers I'd never ever start.... so I'm Jumping in head first.

I'm going to read up on soil mixes tonight, but I need to find a cost effective means of getting 25-30 Yards of soilless or soil mix.

My limitations are this:

1. I will only use Natural Methods, I prefer 100% organic but I'm not concerned with it being OMRI listed or anything.

2. I need the Soil Mix that I use to have enough nutrients in it to sustain the whole season.


I will be brewing compost tea in large batches and then adding to water for a foliar spray and occasional hand watering. I will probably add the tea to 100 plants per day to make sure that every plant gets some fresh tea every 10 days or so.

I also have some Earth Juice Powdered Bloom Nutrients that are cheap and very concentrated....

I will worry more about nutrients when I understand the capabilities of my soil mix and how strong I can make it while keeping it light and aerated.

So for now, if any of you have a Magic Soil Recipe that I can get my local soil company to mix up for me, I'd be very grateful. I know the owner and he's going to clean out his cement mixing pit for me and have me watch as he mixes it all to my liking... problem is, he doesn't understand exactly what I want to do and I don't want to rely entirely on his judgment because he's not the one growing the tomatoes.. I am.

THANKS!

[QUOTE=NisiNJ;257227]It's possible to make raised beds without walls. In [I]The New Victory Garden[/I], the late Bob Thomson describes how he makes his raised beds.

"All my Victory Garden raised beds are 48 inches wide, and most are 8 feet long. ....To make the beds themselves, I use my rake to form the soil between the paths into a flat-topped mound about 8 inches high, with a base width of 48 inches and sides that taper up at about a 48-degree angle to a top that's 36 inches wide......when I'm finished I have raised beds that will last the whole growing season. Once created, these raised beds need only minor reshaping with the rake at the beginning of each season."

[I]The New Victory Garden[/I], 1987

The soil at my community garden is swamplike with no drainage, so everyone builds raised beds...and they are just long rectangular piles of soil. Raised beds may take less labor for setup--and tear down--and would fit with your plan of using part topsoil.[/QUOTE]

This is an awesome Idea! Thank you Thank You, I just needed that brain nudge to get me thinking a new direction.... I'm still thinking about containers... but I'm not opposed to any good idea.

I'm also going to get my soil tested and see what she looks like.

[QUOTE=Petronius_II;257222]Not to be throwing too big a wet blanket on your plans, which are noble in intention to be sure...

I do hope you're factoring in labor somewhere in there, right at the very beginning.

Example: 1000 plants/60 = Any process that takes exactly 1 minute per plant, including moving on to the next plant = ~16 1/2 hours to perform the process on all of them. Leading to the next questions, how many times a week are you going to have to perform processes X, Y, and Z?

In the best case scenario, oodles and oodles of ripe tomatoes, at the very least you're going to have to hire somebody to help you with[I] picking [/I]them. I'm sure many here can back me up on this: the most labor-intensive part of a successful smallish-scale gardening operation is harvesting.

The watering part of a grow-bag operation needs to be strategized well. Our smallish meetinghouse garden has used a moderately expensive (i.e. capital-intensive) drip irrigation system, which failed to keep up with last summer's heat wave, but which works surprisingly well in cooler weather. All along, I've favored a more traditional "raised-sunken" bed system, sometimes referred to as a "waffle bed," with shallow-trench irrigation. For each bed, you put the hose end in the highest part of the trench, fill up the trench and then turn down the water pressure until the amount soaking into the soil = the amount coming out of the house, and that's what I call "deep watering." Works amazingly well in warm dry climates for tomatoes: as the top layers of the soil dry (hopefully mulched plenty well enough they don't dry out all that quickly,) you're basically telling the plant roots, "there's still water down deeper, come and get it." So the roots do exactly that.

Each bed only needs deep watering once or twice a week, for maybe about 1-3 hours per watering, even in the driest of times, once the roots have reached a certain depth. Building the trenches and little mini-dykes that enclose the bed takes X amount of time, maybe twice as much as setting up a drip system. Keeping the trenches free of silt and debris blockage takes very little time. Weeding takes very little time if you pull up most of your weeds by hand as soon as you can in the spring. And maybe do some companion planting with a few fairly shallow-rooted buddies that the tomatoes will get along with; basil, for instance.

The point being, once your dykes and trenches are in place, watering consists of: moving the hose from bed to bed; turning it on' turning it down; turning it off. Easy as pie.

Jack Nicholson's garden in "The Missouri Breaks" was quite an inspiration to me-- but really, it's just one version of the way people have always grown things in the American West. Very similar to what I've described here.

Grow bags? Well, if they don't dry out [I]too[/I] quickly in your climate, that just might work well for you. You would do well to ask around in Montrose, including calling up your USDA extension office, and see what others in your vicinity have experienced with grow bags.[/QUOTE]


Come on man, give me some credit.

1000 plants are PLENTY, and I'll have lot's of work.

I'm prepared to hire help and do what I need to get the job done.

I will also be starting 250 plants early and the other later to stagger some of the work and lower the cost of starting all of them before the last frost indoors.

Watering, and harvesting are going to be planned out like a military strategy. I can't wait to start!

[QUOTE=MileHighGuy;257252]I need the Soil Mix that I use to have enough nutrients in it to sustain the whole season.[/QUOTE]

If you're growing in 5 gal. containers--or even much larger--that's going to be difficult to achieve. Soils have a finite capacity to hold nutrients. Big, heavy, clay soils have a greater capacity than light sandy soils. Without boring you with the scientific details, a big, heavy soil just won't work in a container. So, the successful grower uses a ligher soil mix and fertilizes more frequently. If you look at the texture of a good, pre-packaged soil mix, that's about what you're going for.

If I were you, I'd contact some of the local nurseries and/or garden centers and see what they are using for potting mix. They might be willing to sell you some by the yard.

If you still want to roll your own, here's some guidance. I'm guessing you are in Montrose, Colorado right? Here's a link to a local material supplier:

[url]http://www.coopersoils.com/Decorative_Rock___Top_Soil___Mulch___Bark.html[/url]

Scroll down and look at "soil conditioner" - it's a decomposed pine bark. That would make a good base for a mix. If you used that for 60% of your mix plus 15% peat, 15% perlite and 10% compost or composted manure you'd have a good start.

Haha, that is the soil company I'm working with.

LJ is one of the owners and I know him from around town.

Thanks for the Mix breakdown suggestion.

He was suggesting 60% conditioner and 40% top soil... though as you and many others say... soil has no place in the Grow Bags.

Nutrient feeding would prove to be much to time consuming if needed daily.... weekly, maybe.

I'm thinking about some earlier suggestions with making "Frame-less" Raised Bed's

I have access to a large size tiller and I could make that work... So, Back to the drawing boards.

Right now I have some tomatoes that are ripening right now in my south facing window, they are in 100% coco coir and coco chunks in 7 gallon smart pots and doing awesome, but I feed them often... and I don't have the time or money to feed 1000 plants like I've been feeding these.... This was just a winter experiment to see what the taste is like, so far the tomatoes look very good.

Frameless raised beds are exactly what we've been using in the meetinghouse garden, and I can tell you how they work when the weather gets hot and dry: poorly. Very poorly.

That's why I'm planning to do what I can to persuade the gardening committee to try something a bit more traditional this year. If they're still hot for the idea of using drip irrigation, yeah, that can work, but it's going to take more diligence than we've had going for us the previous two years. At least in your case, I don't think a failure of diligence is going to be a problem.

[QUOTE=Petronius_II;257327]Frameless raised beds are exactly what we've been using in the meetinghouse garden, and I can tell you how they work when the weather gets hot and dry: poorly. Very poorly.

That's why I'm planning to do what I can to persuade the gardening committee to try something a bit more traditional this year. If they're still hot for the idea of using drip irrigation, yeah, that can work, but it's going to take more diligence than we've had going for us the previous two years. At least in your case, I don't think a failure of diligence is going to be a problem.[/QUOTE]

After some research, the property that I'm on has a permit to use the irrigation water next to the house. I don't have water rights like the others that are attached to the land, But I have a permit to use water from it with a fairly large pump.

This is a game changer.

That means I can water without any expense.

This also means that I can plan a better system for watering!!!

Anyways, I really appreciate your comment and real world experience with the frameless beds.

After I get my soil tested, I'll have some further decisions to make.

I might get lucky. The soil has a fairly nice consistency, but fear it's far to alkaline and a little to clay.... anyways, It might not be as bad as I think.

I appreciate the continued input.

Over the next week I'll be gathering some much needed information and updating my plans.

I'll update here soon!!!

One possibility I'm thinking of discussing with the meetinghouse gardening committee is continuing with raised beds, but framing them with adobe bricks. I probably should check on pricing before I propose this, though. I [I]think[/I] adobe would be less expensive than any kind of lumber, but I'm not sure on that.

Others have also recommended hail bails for the raised bed gardens.... I'm still romancing the idea of tilling in 25-50 Yards of top soil and conditioner into my existing ground. I'll decide soon, time is ticking.

Now that I'm thinking about it. I'd like to Line the perimeter of the entire growing area with hail bails to help block the wind while the plants are small and keep any Mulch that I use down on the ground.

This will also serve as barrier to reinforce the First perimeter Deer Fence....

I've got to determine how much the hay bails cost, I'm sure there are some "bad" bails that I could use.

My soil feels clay, but green grass is growing in it and the deer scat is everywhere.

I was reading a book called "One straw revolution" and it really got me thinking about Mulching and I'm considering using straw to cover the entire growing area and transplant the plants into the soil beneath, clearing a whole in the straw for each. I'm hoping this will help keep the soil wet and warmer at night when the hot Colorado sun is in peak summer with the dry breeze and cool nights. I also hope it will keep some weed down.

I've used frameless raised beds for years, with no problems at all. If you rake up a 2" mound, around the edges, it keeps your water & nutrients in the bed also.
[IMG]http://i569.photobucket.com/albums/ss137/nocharge/Tomatoes%207-8-10/CowlickBW.jpg[/IMG]

A watering system can be built very cheap, to do the watering quite easily, just drill the pipe at whatever intervals you are using for plant spacing. Good luck with your project!

***giggles and snickers***

No_charge, what we have here is a failure to communicate. My fault, no doubt.

Your rows with the 2" mound are not frameless. The 2" mound[I] is[/I] the frame. What you have there is a long, narrow version of the same "raised-sunken bed" system I described earlier. The "sunken" part is a bit of a misnomer, because the cultivated/irrigated part of the soil is usually going to end up being [I]at [/I]the same level as the pathways, what with all the tilling and amendments one may add.

What makes "my" system (not original with me by any means) more workable with "rice paddy" whole bed irrigation when the plants are young, followed by shallow-trench irrigation, is, I always built the 2" dykes with big clods of heavy-clay subsoil that I brought up while hand-tilling the bed. Those are the "bricks" of the 2" dykes, and a thick slurry of the same subsoil makes the mortar. A 2" dyke of heavy clay does a pretty good job of containing irrigation water, without the expense of a drip irrigation system.

But [I]your[/I] drip irrigation system looks pretty good, and with irrigation like that, building the dykes with tilled topsoil is going to be all the containment you really need.

... Unless maybe the weather gets[I] really[/I] hot and dry, which was definitely our case last year, when daytime temps for about two months were 98+F day after day. And in the meetinghouse garden, we didn't even have any of those 2" dykes. Any time the drip hoses were left running for any length of time, we had water forming big oblong splotches of damp soil on the [I]sides[/I] of our genuinely frameless beds, and then evaporating straight up into the air.

In 2010, minus last year's heat wave, nobody connected with the meetinghouse garden project (other than myself) seems to have noticed that very much, though I did hear of some complaints about the amount of water we were using. I'm hoping that in March, when we get started planning the 2012 garden, said people will have noticed.

(...Much of the previous paragraph has no bearing on most of you who have followed my writing on this thread so far. Your gardens are your own little kingdom. Group activity and consensual decision-making introduces a whole host of potential communication problems that most of you will never be required to contend with.)

Well, perhaps you missed the beds, I don't know, They are raised about 2ft on the downhillside. I have a sloped garden space, so have to use beds. The beds are 18"wide also. The irrigation is not a drip system, its drilled pvc, the 2" ridge is to keep the water in the bed. The beds are made by raking the soil from the aisles, to build up beds, then water just the beds, not the whole garden, thereby conserving water.

Obviously we do have a communication problem here

good luck with whatever your trying though