Late last year, I received a call from a retail hydro store owner who had a customer interested in purchasing 100 of our 6′ AeroFlo chambers! I thought to myself, “Yeah right. This is a dead end. Nobody sets up 100 Aeroflo chambers.” I was wrong. Mark, owner of Tasty Tomato does.

Tasty Tomato is located in beautiful Steamboat Springs Colorado. At 6,732′ above sea level, the growing season for tomatoes is very short. Hmmm, indoor climate controlled growing? But of course!

Mark grows many varieties of beautiful pesticide free, heirloom tomatoes which he sells directly to high end restaurants and at local farmers markets. I bet the other growers at the farmers markets are green with envy. “Who does that guy think he is? Heirloom tomatoes in the middle of a Colorado winter. The audacity!” Well, this ain’t your grand daddy’s farm buddy. This is 21st century farming and you either change with the times or let them pass you by.

Check out the photo gallery from Marks grow room. Impressive to say the least. He uses our Rapid Rooter trays to germinate his heirloom seeds. Then the seedlings are transplanted into our patented RainForest aeroponic system to get a jump start. No system on the market today produces growth rates like the RainForest.

Then, when they are established and ready to start bearing fruit, it’s off the AeroFlo chambers. This is where it really gets amazing. Mark doesn’t mess around.

Within several weeks, the plants go from mature seedlings to mature fruit! You can’t do that in soil. SCIENCE! Due to overwhelming demand, Mark outgrew his space and moved into a 3000 square foot facility. To produce the equivalent amount of tomatoes would require roughly three times the amount of square footage in a soil garden. Not to mention that in a place like Steamboat Springs, you would be hard pressed to even get mature fruit by the end of the season. Mark gets tomatoes year round!

Of course this can be scaled down to fit your families needs. You can do a small hydroponic system in a South facing window and get some year round homegrown produce. Or, build a small grow room with artificial lighting and climate control. It will cost a little and your produce will end up being more expensive than what you would pay at the grocery store. But, it’s all about priorities. Have you tasted a tomato from a supermarket lately. Of course you haven’t because they have no taste! Flavorless, mealy and probably covered in pesticides. So, what are you waiting for? Get growing, get healthy and get General Hydroponics nutrients and growing systems. It’s easier than you think!

I feel like a plant in transition this week. A simple spring forward of the clocks and I am wilting over searching for the morning light. Benjamin Franklin first proposed daylight savings time in 1784 but the U.S. did not adopt it until World War I. Most people have strong feelings about this mandatory switch (not talking about you Arizona) which can cause a normally happy person to grumble and curse through the flux week.

My grumpiness got me thinking about the transition for plants from the 18 hour photo-period to the 12 hour photo-period. As most of you probably know, a photoperiod is the number of dark hours verses light hours withing a 24 hour period. We have always recommended an 18/6 (18 hours of light, 6 hours of darkness) regimen during the vegetative stage. This cycle closely mimics a hot summer day which induces the plant to grow at a rapid rate while still allowing for a period of darkness/night which is crucial for the plants development. The dark cycled during veg aids in transpiration and translocation and also provides a chance for the garden to cool down. This period of cooler air can discourage mildew and other plant diseases from running rampant in an otherwise consistently warm environment.

The transition, or “stretch” is the process in indoor gardening of switching the lighting to encourage flowering plants to stop their vegetative develpoment to focus on flowering and fruiting. This photoperiod replicates the onset of autumn and initiates hormone development in the plant that will trigger the flowering cycle. During this period of change the plant requires different nutrients to facilitate the appropriate chemical development. Most gardeners will transition a plant between these two stage for a period of a few days to two weeks. This is a critical process that changes and refocuses the plants energy and brings the plant to full maturity.

With indoor gardening we are always trying to copy the natural world. Some plants prefer more light than others, some want specific minerals that others would not be able to uptake. Finding that perfect balance can be tricky, but looking back at the plants natural environment and the area of the world in which it originates will often provide clues. Create the native environment for your plant, and you will have amazing results.

What transition tricks do you have? Do you baby your plants into the new photoperiod or do you make the switch quick and hard? Hope your transition week is almost over. Enjoy the new photoperiod!

Browsing through some of my photos yesterday I came across these 2 very different pics of a local landscape. This is a small, man made lake near my home and it made me think about replicating seasonal effects when gardening indoors. One of our goals as indoor growers is to mimic environmental and nutritional conditions that our plants are naturally exposed/conditioned to. Indoors we do so in an artificial way in order to have our crops respond and produce as we choose. For me these photos shine a great deal of importance on the fact that all plants depend on sometimes subtle, sometimes abrupt seasonal changes in order to identify its own lifecycle and where it stands within it. Some factors like latitude and altitude greatly influence how slow or quickly these changes can occur. We know and practice the basic signals such as reducing daylight hours from 18 to 12. Nitrogen rich nutrient mixtures change to Phosphorus/Potassium dominate mixtures. Some growers even switch from MH bulbs in veg to HPS bulbs in flower in order to mimic seasonal changes in the color spectrum of sunlight.

A “perfect” plant environment is one that matches that in which the plants genes originated. Not all aspects obviously need to match up but the better we replicate these environmental changes the better chance we have of success. So consider this next time you change crops or varietals. Length of daylight, daytime temperature, nighttime temperature of both air and soil/medium/nutrient solution, daytime humidity, nighttime humidity and soil chemistry, to name a few, all come into play. If you can trace any plant to its origin and closely mimic those ideal conditions indoors you can truly maximize genetic potential through tuned environmental conditions.