Hello folks, is there anyway I can grow Tomatoes in the winter? I need to know because I run a pizza hut, and I'm sure that I could stand up on every other restaurant if only I could use my own tomato sauce with my own tomatoes!!!!!!!!
My wife grows winter tomatoes in the greenhouse for our salads but you'd need a pretty big greenhouse to supply all of your tomatoes for making sauce over the winter, wouldn't you? You'd have to do some backwards calculations from how many pounds of tomatoes you need each week and the expected yield in pounds per plant to derive the number of plants needed. Heating a greenhouse isn't cheap so producing your own might not be economically viable.
pli
Hmmm...
I find winter hot house tomatoes not as good as summer garden grown tomatoes. A friend has a greenhouse house and the winter grown tomatoes are no where near as good as those grown in the summer. I am not sure why it is that way. Perhaps not as much sun, city water instead of rain, the outside breeze??? I find my own homemade canned tomatoes taste better that those so called freshly grown in a green house during the winter. Some day I will learn to make my own sun-dried tomatoes, I like sun-dried also.
If you own/run a franchise, a you allowed to change the menu? Enjoy Life... Dan
This is definitely true, but then, tomatoes grown in your own greenhouse in the winter are still better than tomatoes grown in Mexico and shipped to your store in the winter.
--S.
You know where they came from and how they were treated, but do they taste different, after being cooked and seasoned and turned into tomato sauce. If you were serving an uncooked tomato sauce, there would be a little more justification.
Essentially you need suitable temperature and light. The amount of trouble you would have to go to depends on where you live. At Atherton not so much at Tromso quite a lot.
How long is daylight at mid winter? What is the air temperature range from day to night on a typical winter's day?
David
Go to a hydroponics store, buy some lights. Maybe you can incorporate it into the store.
So far you have received a lot of good advice. Traditionally, like many of our foods, tomatoes are a summer crop. You can find ways to increase your season from earlier in Spring to later in the Autumn with the aid of heating and lights and this may help increase your yields.
My advice would be to do as people have been doing for centuries and produce enough for the winter season throughout the summer, make your sauces in the autumn and preserve them in jars ready for use when you need them. As others have so rightly said, growing tomatoes throughout the winter can be costly in heat and light and the results tend not to be as flavourful as summer crops mainly because the light quality is poorer so there is less energy available to create sugars in the fruit.
Victoria.
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