justintempler
Member
- Joined
- Dec 3, 2011
- Messages
- 16
- Points
- 0
After admiring Daniel's success at growing tobacco in containers in Nevada and doing some further research, I've decided to grow my 2012 crop in containers.
Being a fan of Swedish snus I need to be able to grow Dark Air Cured tobacco which usually needs to be grown on a silt loam or silty clay loam soil. Even if I wanted to try my hand at Virginia Sun Cured I would still need a sandy loam soil. Here in central Florida, what I have to work with is a fine sand with almost no topsoil and zero clay. Even with soil amendments the resulting tobacco would more than likely be a very big disappointment. I've been looking for a viable method to grow my DAC, I considered possibly attempting to adapt a method to grow outdoors hydroponically in a sand culture and I think it's doable but the container method looks so more reliable and much simpler.
The plan is to use some form of sub-irrigated planter (http://www.insideurbangreen.org/diy-sub-irrigation/) and a custom prepared potting mix as my growing medium. The SIP method even has the advantage of my not having to worry about my plants drying out in the hot Florida summer sun if I get tied up during a heat wave. The watering isn't perfect but at least I won't have to babysit my plants and water them 2 or 3 times a day. My 2010 crop of DelGold was a royal pain in the ass.
Container soil and ground soil are two completely different animals. Using your local soil and using it in a container and expecting the same results will lead to guaranteed failure. Here is a link to a pdf file I found yesterday entitled "Container Soil Physics and Plant Growth" that explains why container soil needs to be completely different as opposed to growing the same plant in the ground. :
http://www.angelfire.com/ab6/hershey/bssoil.pdf
I've got a lot of research to do to flesh out my plan before I decide on the planter, soil mix and fertilizing method/formula. Luckily there seems to be a lot of people using SIPs to grow tobacco's cousin the tomato, so at least I'm not starting from scratch.
The idea is if I can work out a system to grow DAC here in Florida, that would also encourage other people to do similar grows in areas not native to the variety of tobacco that they want to grow and bring more people into the hobby.
Let the fun begin.
Being a fan of Swedish snus I need to be able to grow Dark Air Cured tobacco which usually needs to be grown on a silt loam or silty clay loam soil. Even if I wanted to try my hand at Virginia Sun Cured I would still need a sandy loam soil. Here in central Florida, what I have to work with is a fine sand with almost no topsoil and zero clay. Even with soil amendments the resulting tobacco would more than likely be a very big disappointment. I've been looking for a viable method to grow my DAC, I considered possibly attempting to adapt a method to grow outdoors hydroponically in a sand culture and I think it's doable but the container method looks so more reliable and much simpler.
The plan is to use some form of sub-irrigated planter (http://www.insideurbangreen.org/diy-sub-irrigation/) and a custom prepared potting mix as my growing medium. The SIP method even has the advantage of my not having to worry about my plants drying out in the hot Florida summer sun if I get tied up during a heat wave. The watering isn't perfect but at least I won't have to babysit my plants and water them 2 or 3 times a day. My 2010 crop of DelGold was a royal pain in the ass.
Container soil and ground soil are two completely different animals. Using your local soil and using it in a container and expecting the same results will lead to guaranteed failure. Here is a link to a pdf file I found yesterday entitled "Container Soil Physics and Plant Growth" that explains why container soil needs to be completely different as opposed to growing the same plant in the ground. :
http://www.angelfire.com/ab6/hershey/bssoil.pdf
I've got a lot of research to do to flesh out my plan before I decide on the planter, soil mix and fertilizing method/formula. Luckily there seems to be a lot of people using SIPs to grow tobacco's cousin the tomato, so at least I'm not starting from scratch.
The idea is if I can work out a system to grow DAC here in Florida, that would also encourage other people to do similar grows in areas not native to the variety of tobacco that they want to grow and bring more people into the hobby.
Let the fun begin.