[peterag]

Hi
I am going to try ring culture this year for  tomatoes, using pea gravel as opposed to  the gro-bag method. I have sprayed the gravel bed with diluted Jeyes fluid as it was not particularly clean (the gravel was stored in the garden on earth and it would appear that worm casts have gradually worked their way up into it).

I have two queries really :-
       1. How many times should the gravel be rinsed to make it acceptable to the tomatoes
       2. Is there anything else that I need to do to the pea gravel  in way of preparation ??

Many thanks
Peter

[FRUITFULL]

We used ring culture last year in the greenhouse in pea shingle.You have to make sure theres no leaks in the waterproof liner under the pea shingle as you never stop watering otherwise.Also we found tomatoes done ok in ring culture but cucumbers dont like it at all as they are laying in water.Peppers were ok too.
Not doing ring culture this year.We are putting everything in buckets with holes in the bottom.
Also dont tread on the pea shingle as its makes holes in the liner (i did that)

[peterag]

Thanks Fruitfull, I hadn't thought about peppers, I was going to try pots for those as they can go indoors to over-winter  and are supposed to start producing very early the following year. I have left one or two miniscule holes in the liner as I experimented last year with one of my tomatoes in which I left it pot in water in an old washing up bowl and the results were not as good as the others, ( statistically speaking  a bad experiment as there were far too many variables and unknown parameters (too me at least) to draw meaningful conclusions).

Many thanks
Peter  javascript:replaceText('%20:)',%20document.forms.postmodify.message);