First harvest!! Just under 3 months from seed, both the Bonsai and the Pinnochio tomato plants had two ripe tomatoes and a bunch of other varieties like Window Box Red are looking close.
First Bonsai tomato harvest!
Given we found two ripe ones of each, my wife and I did a taste test. The Pinnochio was a yellow and a bit smaller. It had a sharp burst of flavor, decently sweet but with some acid. The Bonsai was red with a bit larger fruit. It had a milder, more classic “red tomato” taste and was juicier. We also compared to a more traditional “Sweet Million” grown in my greenhouse. The main difference was the Sweet Million was much sweeter 🙂
Indoors, we are seeing some more plants setting tomato fruit and a few varieties like the Bonsai are seeing some fruit starting to turn red.
Two months in and my 10 outdoor micro-dwarf tomatoes are doing great! Most have lots of fruit. I measured the rough height and an approximate estimate of how much fruit there was on the plant.
Micro-dwarf tomato status across the 10 different varieties. * means more than 2″ from the advertised height
Some interesting trends:
Indoor plants have much less fruit than outdoor plants. Apparently I haven’t been doing a good job of pollination (I have a small fan but must need more). Most indoor plants only have a few fruits and some even have none.
Florida Petite is struggling on the fruit production both indoor and outdoor.
A few plants are more than 2″ taller than the advertised height, including Florida Petite (outdoors), Bonsai (indoors), and Pigmy (outdoors).
So yes, I can say definitively that planting micro-dwarf tomatoes 6″ apart is too close together and now I have one giant tomato carpet 😀 Unfortunately, I think my results will be less accurate now because some of my plants are being shaded by others quite a bit. In fact, my Bonsai plant near the center is really taking over. I’m going to move these indoor plants to a different location in this room under one Mars Hydro TS600 light so I can try something different in this space.
All 10 of my micro-dwarf tomatoes have kind of melded together
Two weeks after transplanting into the sub-irrigated bin indoors, the tomatoes are taking off! So much so that I probably put them too close together, even though I put them 6 inches apart. I fertilized both the indoor and outdoor tomatoes to keep them well nourished.
The micro-dwarf tomatoes are all growing together but aren’t getting very tall, which is good. Outdoor micro dwarf tomatoes are starting to have some small tomatoes!
Arrangement of tomato plants with light intensity measurement.
I have two QB120 HLG lights with reflective sides around the back and sides of the sub irrigated bin. I measured the light intensity, which varied between 30k and 39k lux. Normal sunlight is ~100 lux, so on average I’m operating with 1/3 power of the sun. However, I do have the lights on 15 hours a day without cloud cover so maybe closer to half the DLI of the sun or a tomato plant that gets half a day of sun. I also added a fan to keep some circulation and hopefully wind pollinate the tomatoes.
After hardening off, I planted one of each of my 10 varieties in my designated outdoor garden plot (well the front half of the raised bed). It sits over my compost pile so is more of a large container than raised bed, but has drip irrigation that provides it with water so it doesn’t dry out too much. Then also consider adding fruit trees to your garden as they look superb and also provide a bountiful supply of fresh fruit so are an amazing addition to any garden.
I now have one variety growing indoors and one variety growing outdoors so it will be interesting to see how each environment does! The real game changer in getting your growing done is BuildASoil Potting Soil. My outdoors environment is less well controlled with regards to sunlight because you can see my house is to the right of the bed so as the afternoon progresses, the shade moves left to right across the bed. So for better or for worse, the tomatoes on the right side will see more sun.
Outdoor tomatoe plot full of 10 micro-dwarf tomatoes.
Since many of my tomato seedlings were already starting to flower, I’ve been meaning to transplant them. I think I got fooled on when to transplant because they are so tiny and dwarf! Tonight I was able to get around to transplanting the indoor ones into my 27 gallon sub-irrigated bin. I have 10 varieties so I spaced them out about 6 inches apart.
Spaced about 6″ apartAll 10 varieties of tomatoes transplanted.
They are so cute and tiny! 🙂 I still need to do some adjusting of the lights to make sure it’s reasonably well balanced, fertilize, and measure some statistics. I also need to transplant the outdoor ones as well, but that will come after a few days of hardening off.
Today I spent some time creating a new sub-irrigated bin to put the tomatoes in. I used a pretty even mix of potting soil (aka peat moss & decomposed mulch), my own compost, and vermiculite. This will be the bin the tomatoes get transplanted to for the indoors part of the test.
Only 4 weeks into the experiment and just noticed tiny flowers are appearing! That’s pretty crazy. I guess I was underestimating how mature the seedlings were because they were so tiny. I think the next step for this weekend is to transplant them to their final locations.
3 weeks in, I figured it was time to thin the tomatoes. Since I had planted two seeds in each square, some had multiple growing tomatoes. For each square that had two, I gave the smaller, weaker tomato the chop. I now have exactly two tomato plants for each variety.
The Yellow Canary had one square that had no plants and one square that had two plants so I carefully separated them out into two new squares. This definitely counts as different treatment, so I’ll record these results with an asterisk, but I was more interested in learning as much as I could even if the experiment wasn’t perfectly controlled.
All of the cells are up except one of the Yellow Canary, which means I probably overlooked it when planting 🙁 Everything else is doing well and today I watered with half-strength fertilizer. I’ve also been rotating the seed flat periodically every few days to get light and airflow more uniformly distributed over time.
It’s Day 6 of the Micro Dwarf Tomato Experiment and almost all the tomato cells are up! Yellow Canary seems a bit slow, one cell has a half-sprouted tomato poking up and the other has nothing. I removed the clear plastic humidity lid and installed a fan.
Background: A few years ago, I got interested in growing the smallest tomato, the Micro Tom as a curiosity, so I grew it in a small 4-6″ pot over the winter. It was super cute and provided a half-dozen tomatoes or so (but I didn’t have very much light, just a few fluorescent tubes), but I never gave it too much serious thought. Since then, I’ve been growing tomatoes like Maskotka, Patio Choice Yellow F1, and Red Robin indoors but never been super happy with any of them. I grew them under HLG QB120 lights. Both Patio Choice and Red Robin were both too lanky so the bottoms didn’t get much light while the tops got too close to the light and burned. They also liked get large, to fall over the side of the container, generally be unruly, which made it hard to harvest. Maskotka were great from a foliage standpoint with short, dense coverage that took great advantage of the light, but despite so much greenery, I never got very many tomatoes. So when I read a blog post on growing micro dwarf tomatoes indoors during the winter, I got intrigued all over again. However, given the variance I’ve see with just the three varieties I’ve tried so far, how to pick which ones to try?
The selection process: There are plenty of micro-dwarf tomatoes to choose from. Curtis at Renaissance Farms has a lot of posts and YouTube videos, but I get the impression every tomato variety is his favorite, so that doesn’t help narrow things down. I also wonder if there is actually that much difference or if all the micro dwarf varieties would be about the same. So I figured it would be worth doing an experiment with a bunch of different varieties to see which worked best for me. Since they are so small, I decided to pick 10 varieties. So, how did I decide?
Availability: Specifically, had to be available from Renaissance Farms’ selections (especially after I discovered Baker Creek was out of Orange Hat).
Under 12″: I only picked varieties that we reported to be under a foot tall because I have HLG QB 120 quantum boards all at the same height so ideally the canopy should be within 6-12″ for even lighting.
Personal inclination: I read over reviews and descriptions and kinda went with what seemed cool.
Day 1, planting: I planted out 20 cells of my GrowEase seed starting kit with two cells of each variety, each cell having two seeds. I randomized the placement of the seeds so as to reduce some of the bias. Then it went under an HLG QB120 light.
Evaluation Criteria: So all good experiments have an evaluation criteria: what are we looking for in a good micro dwarf tomato? For each variety, I’ll be checking up on the following things:
Seeds all preped to germinate!
Size: How tall does the tomato plant get? Ideally looking for something under 12″.
Productivity: How many tomatoes does each plant produce? More is better!
Season: How long does it take for each variety to produce tomatoes and how long does each harvest last?
Flavorful: Very subjective, but wanting something tasting better than store-bought tomatoes at the very least.
Robustness: how well does the plant resist disease / insects / etc?
We’ll see how this experiment goes! I’ll try to control for some of the variables, but honestly there are too many (for instance, I should probably have at least 5-10 of each variety for a real experiment). And I haven’t had the best of luck with pests so we’ll see if they even make it to the finish line still reasonably healthy. If nothing else, it should be fun to see how the ones that survive grow and taste. Always an adventure!
