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Pastimes : Don't Ask Rambi -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JF Quinnelly who wrote (65692)	10/31/2004 12:03:28 AM
From: Crocodile	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 71178

I'll look for some photos of the type of greenhouses I mean. In the meantime, here's something interesting. Tomatoes sell for about 2-something a pound here -- nice ones sold with a section of vine. Actually pretty decent tasting for greenhouse tomatoes. rnw.nl

To: JF Quinnelly who wrote (65692)	10/31/2004 12:32:40 AM
From: Crocodile	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 71178

These aren't the best photos of typical greenhouses, but they'll give you some idea of the appearance. Top left photo shows what a typical "field" of greenhouses looks like. They are arranged as a group so that they cover a few solid acres. The tomatoes are hydroponic -- vines grow up clear plastic tubing suspended from the ceiling. Pollination is done by bees kept in hives in the greenhouses. While tomatoes are the main crop, the seedless English cucumbers are also grown in the same set-up. Over about the past 2 years, the big red bell peppers are starting to be a major product as well -- before that, we imported most of them from Holland, but now we grow our own. Boston lettuce is grown at some operations, and we're now starting to get very reasonably priced bundles of fresh herbs grown year-round from an operation in Quebec. The greenhouse technology is pretty much based on the Dutch systems - in fact, many forms of agriculture up here are based on technology used in the Netherlands (many Canadian farm families are Dutch). ontariogreenhouse.com

To: JF Quinnelly who wrote (65692)	11/2/2004 10:34:34 AM
From: Rambi	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 71178

When I was in grad school, we had a little cottage in the country. We put in a fairly goodsized garden, begged a giant garbage pail of manure from a horsefarm nearby and put in tomatoes, corn, beans, carrots, cucumbers, eggplant. We had such an enormous crop of everything (except corn which we learned later can't be planted in one long row but needs to x-fertilize) that by the end of the season we were standing out there with friends drinking beer and throwing tomatoes at trees. We couldn't give the excess away fast enough. The tomatoes were incredible. Sometimes for lunch, I would go out with a shaker of garlic salt, take one off the vine, and stand there eating the warm fruit and contemplating how simple life could be. No chemicals, no bug sprays. All natural. If I, who can can suck the chlorophyl from the leaves of a thriving plant by walking by it too closely, could achieve this, then why are tomatoes so damn expensive??