Aquaponics - Tomato in PVC

It's been a while since I used PVC in a novel way, so I thought I'd cut all the leaves off my tomato and ram the stems and roots into a PVC pipe.

It seems to have worked.

I like to think of it as a solution.

I started with four tomato plants that have been happily growing with their roots just dangling in my fish tank.

That's them after I fulled them from their comfortable home and lay them on top of the fish tank. They are around a metre long from root tip to top.

They look healthy, and have a stack of clusters of flowers and little fruit forming all over the place.



They were a bit bushy to fit them into a PVC tube with a 90 degree angle and it was going to be way too difficult to jam all that foliage through the pipe, so I trimmed some of it away.

Trimmed.

Now it fit easily into the pipe so that the tips were peeking out of one end, and the roots hanging out of the other.











The only thing now is to see if my aquaponics system will be a nice enough place for it to live that it bounces back from my cutty mistreatment.

I'm willing to bet this experiment will work quite well.

One potential problem I can see is that it will still try to make foliage in the pipe, and as a result, the conditions in the Tube will be damp and still, and that might lead to disease.

If that looks like being the case, I can always simply cut the PVC away with scissors.

It only has to last long enough for the tomatoes to reach outside and concentrate their growing out there.

Once there is enough foliage outside, and if I do have to cut the PVC away, it should be easy enough to keep the stems inside the grow house free of new growth.




120 Things in 20 years - only time will tell if my aquaponics PVC tomato works. It should be just a few weeks before I know.