Hey guys, Chris Michael
here from Bright Agrotech
down here with Haydn
Christensen of BayBerry Fresh
down here right outside of Fort Collins.
Hayden's got a pretty
awesome cherry tomato farm
going on this summer so I
thought we'd take a second
to just walk through and
let Haydn show us around.
So let's get started.
(playful, upbeat music)
- Hi. I'm Haydn Christensen
with BayBerry Fresh.
In these two hoop houses I have
just shy of 800 cherry tomato plants.
They're Sweet 100 variety.
They're grown in coconut
core bags and pots
and they're run-to-waste
fertigation system.
They're trellised with a lean
and lower system on wires
so that we can, and they're pruned to a
single liter with two pots per plant,
so that helps us to really
push our growth toward fruit.
So these plants were
started from seed in January
and then they were moved
up to larger and larger
pot and plant sizes until they were
moved up to the full size pot in April
so they are eight months
old at this point.
So these were started
in 1-inch rockwool cubes
and then they were moved
to a larger coconut core
but they're planted in
just straight coconut core.
It's ground up coconut husks
from India that we bought
in blocks and then we
hydrated and filled bags with.
Then these get irrigated
every two to three hours
depending on the sun and how warm it is.
It's a two gallon per hour
dripper and that just makes sure
that they stay moist but
they don't stay super wet
and they never really dry out.
So when the plants get up to our wire,
which we've put up to about my
hand height, reaching height,
as soon as they get up to the wire,
then they'll be lowered on these Tomahooks
and they're a little bit behind right now
so they should be below the wire.
You can lower them eight inches at a time
and then as you lower them,
the stems that we prune
the old clusters and leaves off of
we'll lay down beside the pots so that
we're just managing this
section of the plant.
We can also do cluster
pruning to make sure
the fruit doesn't get too small.
So these plants are a little bit behind,
but normally we would cluster prune them
to make sure we only have
a set number of fruit.
We would sucker them which means
we're keeping them to one single stem
and then we'll leaf prune
the bottom dead leaves
and sick leaves off the
bottom as we go along.
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So this is just basically someone
and we trellis them up on
a lean and lower system.
The Tomahooks come with
30 to 40 feet of twine
wound onto them and so basically we just
use tomato clips to
clip them to the string.
You can tie them on but when
you start leaning and lowering,
this gives them more flexibility to move
without breaking stems and
leaves and that sort of thing.
(upbeat, playful music)
So I run a fairly standard tomato spacing.
They have four square foot per plant
because there's two pots per plant
and the pots are spaced two feet apart
and the rows of pots are four feet apart.
So that basically gives each plant
a one by four or two by
two area for it to grow in.
So the cherry tomatoes,
because they ripen up
really quickly, go from
green to ripe fairly rapidly
and if you let them get too
ripe, they'll actually split.
So we pick them right
before they ripen up.
We pick them every other day, so right now
I have the green houses staggered
so we're picking every day, but each plant
is getting picked over every other day
or every two days at the most.
So then we put them in my walk-in cooler
and we stack them all up
from four or five days
and then I sell them
primarily to Whole Foods.
I do some small accounts
and then this year
a bunch of them are going to be going
to the Boulder School District.
The outside ones are not these so much.
So if they are going into retail space
they're going into pint
clam shells labeled.
If they're restaurants or the school
then they're going in bulk boxes
in 10-pound or 20-pound crates.
I do also do Whole Foods demos and then
I try to put a little
information on Facebook
but the Whole Foods demos I think are
one of the more valuable things I do
because I can go in the store.
I pick the busiest time of the week
and I give out samples,
because that's the thing,
these look like another red cherry tomato
but until you try them you don't realize
that they're a lot better.
Anyway, giving out samples
and talking to people,
most people that shop
at a major grocery store
never talked to a famer,
so they get really excited.
They usually don't think
I'm the farmer at the start
until I explain it to them,
but it's a really valuable marketing tool.
- [Chris] What makes your
tomatoes so much different
from the other ones you
see at the grocery stores?
- So these are a Sweet 100 variety,
so it's a variety
difference to start with,
and that makes them just
a little bit sweeter
and they have really good flavor.
Since I pick them really frequently,
and I don't know necessarily
what the other guys are doing,
but I pick them as close to ripe as I can,
and I've experimented with it so
we're picking them up to right before.
if you picked them any later
than we're picking them,
they wouldn't hold up
well and they would split
and if you pick them any
earlier, they're not as good.
So we've gone and found
just the really fine line
between shelf life and
stability and flavor.
It seems like we've
been able to get closer
to flavor than some of the other ones.
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- [Chris] Customers are
pretty happy with your stuff?
- Yes, they love them.
I've never heard anybody say
they did not like these cherry tomatoes.
Most of them love them, but
they at least like them.
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