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.
(playful, upbeat music)
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.
(upbeat, playful music)
- [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.
(upbeat, playful music)