Harvesting Grape Tomatoes

Sweetelle in different maturity. Kyra was bored.

Sweetelle is the variety of grape tomato we plant at 248x52.  Even though tomatoes are perennials, most farmers including us cut off the plant every year because tomatoes taste better when they are younger.  Depending on the customers, the preferable size differs.  But we don't want it too small because it will shrink and look ugly.  We also need to be careful about the sunburned tomatoes because they look ugly and don't sell.

A saggy grape tomato.

Grape tomatoes with sunburns.

The cause of sunburn, according to Kyra, is water on the tomato and strong sunlight.

Note that we pick not only the red ones but also some orange or even partially green tomatoes.  In the very top picture, the tomatoes should be no greener than the third one from the right; that one barely passes the mark.  This is because tomatoes get redden by themselves as they sit on the shelf.  Also, we can quicken the reddening by covering tomatoes with CO₂ according to Frantz.

Cutting Leaves Off

When the minis are tall enough to reach the top wire, we cut the leaves at the bottom of minis to concentrate nutrients on the top part.  This helps the workers to pick minis easily because all the minis will grow on the top.  The picture below shows the trimmed mini plant.

Johnston cutting leaves off.

Kyra phoning in work, caught on camera!

As you can see, we completely trim off everything—even if we have fully grown cucumbers there.  This is because we prefer organization and efficiency over meager plus in production.

Twiddling and Pruning Mini Cucumbers

Kyra showing us Picowell (mini cucumber).

Picowell, a variety of mini cucumber, is one of the main plants we grow at 248x52 greenhouse.  The planting to cutting cycle is about 3 month, where harvesting starts about 2 weeks after the planting.  We buy a seedling planted in a block, which is roughly 2-3 weeks old.  So we are actually harvesting after 4-5 weeks counting from the seeding.

It is very important to prune and twiddle the plant as it grows.  Pruning the suckers will prevent plants branching out.  We use the term suckers to refer to the head that is not on the top.  It is easy to distinguish a sucker from a leaf or a cucumber as you can see from the picture below.

Orange - sucker
Teal - leaf
Blue - cucumber

An image of a head.  We can see strings growing out to the
left and right.

Head is basically the sucker on top of the plant, and we want this because it grows upward.  It is helpful to note that whenever we see a leaf, there is also a cucumber and a sucker.  They are sort of like a triplet that germinate at the same point.  In the picture above, you can see that the sucker (orange), the cucumber (blue), and the leaf (teal) germinate from the same point.

We also need to snap off the strings because they catch on other plants and create a mess.  By "strings" we mean the vines growing out from the plant that tries to tangle on to other objects.  We may also refer to the white string to twiddle the plant as a "string," so be aware of the distinction.

That being said, twiddling a stem around a string keeps the plant in control.  We consistently twiddle it clockwise to prevent it from being untangled (i.e. if someone does it counterclockwise).  The following is the image showing how to twiddle.

Use one hand to pull down the string
and the other to twiddle.

A string nicely twiddled behind the string (the plant string,
not the white string) to prevent damaging the cucumber.

We do pruning and twiddling about three times a week.  However, the minis at 248x52 grow slow because we are not heating the greenhouse at night.  So we only do this twice a week.

Blogger Launched!

Testing post on the Blogger
Picture below:

Johnston and Kyra.

Me (Yucho) and Johnston will be writing greenhouse operation reports in this blog, starting from today.