What Tomato varieties do you grow? Here in Wasilla, Alaska our season can be cool and short so short season varieties do best and cold tolerant varieties are preferred.
I have decided to only grow Bush Early Girl hybrid tomatoes in my greenhouse now. I started out, many years ago, growing the local popular varieties: Glacier, Early Girl, Tanana, and Stupice tomatoes. Growing tomatoes outdoors, where I live, is not easy since low nighttime temperatures (below 55 F) interfere with pollination. Optimal growing conditions for tomatoes are daytime temperatures of 70 to 85 F and nighttime lows between 55 to 65 F.
I now only grow tomatoes inside my small greenhouse in my self watering Alaska Grow Buckets. I quickly learned that larger indeterminate variety tomatoes can outgrow my small greenhouse with a low roof and needed to be pruned back when they grew up too big. Proper fertilizer is also very important. High Nitrogen fertilizer will promote excess plant growth and can produce less fruit.
To save on space I decided to switch to shorter Bush or Dwarf varieties. I was very happy with a compact sturdy variety called Extreme Bush Tomato. They were very prolific, cold tolerant, and full of 3-4 oz fruit. About golf ball to baseball in size. Extreme Bush are an open pollinated heirloom variety and great for seed-saving.
Extreme Bush Tomatoes are prone to cracking when ripe, but since I make tomato sauce it really didn't matter to me. They also suffered from early blight or maybe Fusarium wilt and would turn yellow and then brown with disease by late summer. Pinching off the lower branches and any yellow or brown leaves and spraying every week with a fungicide is probably necessary. Fungal diseases are a problem in any greenhouse with high humidity and poor air circulation. Do not over crowd your plants in a greenhouse. Spacing plants is very important and oscillating fans can help provide needed air movement. Good greenhouse ventilation is very important for removing excess heat and humidity.
I started looking for a compact greenhouse tomato with larger fruit, better disease resistance, and without the cracking problem.
Extreme Bush Tomato
Bush Early Girl Hybrid Tomato
Bush Early Girl F1 hybrid is a very productive, determinate, short season, modern hybrid related to the popular Early Girl tomato. They grow on sturdy compact plants. Germination takes 5-7 days, and 55-65 days to maturity depending on conditions. As a short season early tomato they are cold tolerant down to 40 F similar to Early Girl yet High daytime temperatures (above 85 F) and low nighttime temperatures (below 55 F) can interfere with pollination.
As a hybrid tomato you cannot save the seeds, but they are very popular and available from most seed suppliers. They still do require support and I use a string trellis with tomato clips. The tomatoes are larger and more flavorful than Early Girl on shorter plants perfect for containers or where space is limited. They are also listed as VFFNT disease resistant.
V = Verticillium wilt
FF = Fusarium wilt, races 1 & 2
N = Root Knot Nematodes
T = Tobacco mosaic virus
The larger fruit are big enough for slicing on a burger. Cracking was not a problem with this variety. They are very disease resistant and I have had very little disease problems in my small greenhouse. For this reason I have decided that I now only grow Bush Early Girl hybrid tomatoes in my small Alaska greenhouse.
Bush Early Girl hybrid is the first large slicing tomato I have grown in Alaska and the larger size made for a good harvest. I start my seeds indoors in February and move plants out to my greenhouse into my Alaska Grow Buckets in May. They have good flavor and made excellent tomato sauce.
This photo was taken in early April and I still have 4-6 weeks of freezing nighttime temperatures. So when do you start your seeds and when to you plant them out in your greenhouse? I am lucky to have a home weather station that tracks the overnight temperature and lets me judge when it is safe to move my plants or if I need to add a space heater. As you can see on the graph below; on May 19th the outside low temperature was 32 F and may have damaged sensitive seedlings.
Thanks to my electric space heater it will keep my small 8x16 ft. greenhouse about 10-20 degrees above the outside temperature. I try to keep the overnight low temperature above 40 degrees F.
You can find everything you need to make your own self watering Alaska Grow Buckets on my website AlaskaGrowBuckets.com.
