Growing high brix tomatoes, fruits, vegetables and berries.
It has been our experience that it is relatively simple to grow high quality excellent brix or better in a simple compost medium using our organic garden kit - no need for expensive complex soil mixtures or expensive soil tests. Here's how we grow 13 brix large size tomatoes. Or any other vegetables, fruits and greens and berries you may want to grow.
In our Organic Gardening Kit there are: 14 cups of Biosol Mix 7-2-3 fertilizer, 7 cups of Planters II trace mineral fertilizer, 6 cups of low magnesium lime, 5 cups of soft rock phosphate, and 3 cups of gypsum. Dump them all into the 5-gallon kit bucket, put the lid on and shake thoroughly. In a container put 2 cubic feet of compost then spread 2.5 cups of this blended fertilizer over the surface, working evenly into the top 8 to 10 inches. Make a hole in the middle to receive the tomato plant. Apply about a tablespoon of BioVam (contains Mycorrhiza fungi spores and hyphe and several species of beneficial bacteria and a couple species of trichoderma fungi) on the roots of the tomato plant. Put up a six foot cage made of concrete reinforcement fabric. The plants will usually grow four feet above those cages but they are strong enough to hold the weight of the plants.
Brew up one gallon of our Microbe Tea (brewer is part of kit), add ¼ cup of Yucca Extract to the tea after it is brewed and spray it out using a modified ortho dial and spray sprayer onto the plants and soils once a week, one quart covers 500 to 1,000 square feet. The microbe food in the tea is in fine powdered form and contains organic fertilizer, lime, SRP, gypsum, planters II, soluble kelp, and dried cane molasses. Only strains of beneficial bacteria and fungi are in the microbe tea.
The minerals we use contain all the calcium compounds needed by a wide variety of plants. Many plants specialize in a predominant calcium compound and we are making sure those compounds are present and not relying on low level activity to somehow put them all together. It doesn't matter if the tomatoes are hybrid or heirloom (open pollinated). We prefer certain ones of both. When the growing season is very warm (last very warm year was 2007 in Spokane), we get about 400 large sized tomatoes off one plant in four separate pickings. Off indeterminate Roma tomato plants we can easily produce over 250 tomatoes. The brix of cherry tomato's go well above 13. We have kept tomatoes at room temperature as long as 14 months. They faded to an orange color. All the seeds sprouted. The tomatoes picked green at the end of the season ripened in two weeks and were high brix.
We keep hearing various experts warn of too much potassium out of compost. Sorry, but that doesn't interfere with what we have been doing. We've measured the ergs from the above system at 450 at the surface and one year later it was still 450. That tells us the compost is holding the minerals in place.
We have also found that weeds don't like growing in this sort of mix. When the ERGS of energy from the above system drop below 260, weeds will grow but their roots won't go into soils that are above 260 ERGS.
We have also found that if equal parts of sand, peat moss, and perlite are used to make the growing medium, it will be a total failure at growing high brix plants with this system. We have not looked at this particular problem to track what is up with it, but we suspect that a) it's not a good medium for sustaining soil life and or b) minerals leech out of the medium fairly fast and or c) some unidentified factor. Even starting seeds with that mixture really sucks.
The fastest we have seen plants grow to harvest something ripe is 28 days; tomato, cucumber, crook neck squash, and green bell pepper were ready to eat. We are talking about having at least one veggie or fruit fully mature ready to eat. This is all grown outside.
We have taken the same compost mineral mixture and put BioVam with seeds to start plants in small pots and the pots are easily filled with roots in a week. We water the seed starts with Yucca water and a hydroponics light over the seed start pots. This is fast and we don't have to acclimatize anything, just plant them out and they take off growing. We tried seed germination in peat mixes and they frequently failed.
In 2007, the last warm year we had here in Spokane, before the pre-ice-age weather started up during the summers, everything we grew was excellent brix or better with the above system. It's July 2, 2010 and 59 F at 10:55 am when it should be 20 degrees warmer. Nevertheless our tomato plants have set fruit and are about three feet high so far. They were planted as small transplants in the first week of June. We have had one day that went into the 80's so far.
Our goal has been to routinely and consistently grow all the high brix food we can eat or sell. We are doing this in a rather small backyard. There's ten grape plants, ten black berry plants, 500 raspberry plants and about 40 containers in an area about 50 x 40 feet along with a 15' above ground swimming pool. The lawn is out front with a couple of pear trees. Visitors frequently remark that we can't possibly eat all the food they see us growing in containers. Red and Yukon Gold potatoes, peppers, tomatoes, assorted herbs, squashes, peas, beans, spinach, onions, leeks, watermelon, cantaloupe, pumpkin, radishes, lettuce, grapes, blackberries, raspberries, blueberries, pears, and more. We sell raspberries and blackberries and we give away lots too.
We first discovered this method of growing high brix with our Raspberries. Our red raspberries are heritage red. I had a project to move the plant rows farther apart. I dug up all the plants, rotor tilled the entire area, put BioVam that a friend had given to me on the plant roots when they went back into the ground. In a two food wide strip down each row per square foot, I put down one cup of mined gypsum, 1 cup hard rock phosphate, and 1 cup Biosol Mix 7-2-3 then raked the fertilizers into the ground. We watered the plants with an overhead sprinkler in those days. The next year I had a 100% yield increase in berries, from 20 flats to 40 flats. They were 19 brix. The birds took interest in eating raspberry plant leaves. These were the healthiest plants we've ever seen. We had clay soils which opened up four feet in depth. We found later that the primary calcium compound found in Raspberries is Gypsum. We tried that same set of ingredients on tomatoes, but I didn't get high brix. When I added lime (calcium oxide source) to the soils with the other ingredients, the brix shot up to 10. When we changed to compost growing medium and lime, SRP, and gypsum, the brix went to 13 on large tomatoes and we had a considerable increase in plant yields, easily 400 large tomatoes in four pickings of about 100 each off each plant. No plant has ever produced less than 50 to 80 tomatoes.
Furnishing soft rock / hard rock phosphate is instrumental in gaining high levels of health in plants. We are also convinced that making sure the predominant calcium compounds in each plant are represented in the calcium's will give additional leverage; we saw that to be true with Raspberries and Tomatoes. Lime does not produce the high brix raspberries but gypsum is part of what works. Gypsum does not produce high brix tomatoes but lime's presence with the other materials works to get the 13 brix tomatoes.
I found in Dr Beddoe's book, “Biologic Ionization as applied to Farming and Soil Management” that a reduction in available potassium along with an increase in available phosphate will keep the weeds down. We also found recently that gypsum added to soils can reduce the available potassium. With bacteria that makes the phosphate minerals available from soft or hard rock phosphate, we've been able to keep weeds out of our Raspberry patch for several years now. When that first happened 14 years ago, I felt like I was a slave to weeds that had been freed!
After we got high brix results with no weeds, we started looking for people who might have some answers to what was happening. Almost all the “experts” we encountered tried to talk us out of doing what we were doing saying it wouldn't work. Every time we listen to one of those “experts” we found all our progress going backwards. We've had enough of their advice, “you can't use hard rock phosphate” …“you are going to ruin your land”… “you can't get this to work in the first year”. We've been growing raspberries at 16-19 brix for 14 years! When is the land supposed to be ruined? (hype and scare tactics). Our blackberries have been a minimum of 17 brix and are going into their fourth year now with a bumper crop. Our grapes have been 22-26 brix and love the method we've been applying to them. Most of the time we are way over excellent on the brix charts on everything grown.
I credit Rex Harrill's book on using a refractometer to evaluate the quality of plants as the pivotal point that got me to look at the work of Dr Carey Reams and his students for providing some of the answers we have been looking for after growing high brix Raspberry plants.
We have achieved all this using our "Organic Gardening Kit". So can you. User's world wide report the same great results in wildly varying temperatures, soils and plants grown. You don't need special knowledge or training, just follow our simple directions. Don't have a garden in yet? Think it is too late to grow one? Not so with our Organic Gardening Kit! You have plenty of time! We have planted complete gardens here in Spokane, WA, in ground as late as the first week in August achieving complete harvest, right on through many frosts before being froze out. One year planting was done in the middle of a two week 90 degree heat wave, nothing bolted; one year planting was done in our recent cold weather summers, everything grew like it did not matter; one year was relatively normal, very high yields. All produced high yields and high brix and no losses.
To buy a garden kit or to learn more about our high performance growing system call us any time at 509-327-7670 or email us at thomas@tandjenterprises.com. Visit our web site http://www.tandjenterprises.com/ to learn more.
Tags: Growing High Brix Tomatoes Fruits Vegetables Berries T&J Enterprises
