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Perfect peppers - St. David's Hydroponics Grows them for shipment across North America (NiagaraThisWeek.com) |
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The Hydroponic Garden--A Guide to Hydroponics
Hydroponics allows us to grow the plants, fruits and vegetables of our choice--even in limited space--without using soil. It's an amazing way to produce perfect specimens and offers TONS of advantages that traditional gardening can't come close to touching!
Author: Lynn Ogryzlo, Just a Taste
May 30, 2008 They harvest about 75 kilos of giant, perfect peppers each week. St.
David's Hydroponics is a whopping 17 1/2 acres of agricultural activity
under glass -- and it's hot. As I walked through the thousands of
eight-foot tall pepper plants, workers were harvesting red peppers.
Huge trailers full and overflowing with glistening, beautiful peppers
were being wheeled into the packaging area to be sorted by size and
packaged by weight. Boxes were piled high, waiting for shipment to
grocery stores that would offer these tasty peppers within 24 hours of
being picked. Now that's fresh! I grow peppers in my own backyard and what I found at St. David's
Hydroponics was an amazingly huge operation that was more science than
I'd known to be possible. Harvest ends in November. Plants are removed and new seedlings
are planted. Within four to five weeks the pepper plants are two feet
tall and after eight weeks or so, the first peppers come off the
plants. From November to February, no peppers are harvested. The plants are pruned back so the peppers grow large and hardy.
As I watched huge trailers of peppers move by me I noticed how clean
and beautiful they look. They use no sprays, they're fed organic
material and everything about growing and running the greenhouse is
perfectly natural. It's an efficient operation, producing healthy,
delicious and safe food. Pickers were busy cutting ripe peppers from the tall plants,
packers were busy sorting and boxing them while a transport truck backs
into the loading dock. Even though peppers have a shelf life of two
weeks, these peppers will be on the shelves of high-end grocers across
North America the next day or two (depending on the distance). This is
contrary to the shriveled, soft peppers we often see in some local
stores that come from the other side of the world. By the time we buy
them, they've begun to expire. read more ...
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