Hello from Colombia! Growing in the tropics

[AdrianaG]

After loving and growing many heirlooms in the USA I went on a 5-year tomato-growing hiatus as my husband and I embarked on an expat adventure in Colombia. We are finally settled at 7,000 foot elevation about an hour outside of Medellin Colombia and FINALLY have a garden of my own.

We have absolutely perfect growing conditions here with daytime highs averaging 72°F year-round, lows of 55°F and minimal seasonal variations. It will be a trip on the learning curve to see how different plants perform without the inevitable end brought about by winter.

Grocery store tomatoes here are absolutely flavorless, so my first search for seeds was for Cherokee Purple with the first fruits about 2” in diameter. Aside from CP I am focusing my efforts on an assortment of dwarf tomatoes - I have Dwarf Metallica and Dwarf Awesome at the flowering stage and 5 other recently aquired Dwarf tomato seed varieties seeded yesterday.

I will be happy to share seeds and experiences once I have fruits. If you are growing in Colombia I would love to connect. I am growing and assortment of herbs, leafy greens and vegetables and strawberries in 8 self-watering raised beds and one in ground bed plus a number of fruit trees.

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[MissS]

Welcome @AdrianaG I bet that it feels great to get back in the garden again. I am so envious of your climate. Can you grow tomatoes year round? What is the screened in building? Is it a cat house?

[Whwoz]

Welcome to the Junction from the Land Down Under @AdrianaG. Sounds like you are in a great place for growing tomatoes and your garden looks wonderful.

[Cornelius_Gotchberg]

Welcome from America's Dairyland!

The Gotch

[AdrianaG]

Welcome @AdrianaG I bet that it feels great to get back in the garden again. I am so envious of your climate. Can you grow tomatoes year round? What is the screened in building? Is it a cat house?

Yes, we have year-round growing, what I have no experience with is the life-span of the plants so I can plan replacements for continuous production.

The screened house is my chicken coop. To the right of it is a small greenhouse, aka “my office”.

Somehow my raised bed picture refused to load, let me try again.

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[rxkeith]

welcome to the forum from the untropical U.P.
we won't be near 72 degrees until may????
what will determine life span of your tomatoes will be
whatever disease burden takes them out, some kind of blight,
virus or bug. it will be interesting to hear how it works out for you.
how did you end up in columbia? how long did it take you to get used
to living at 7000 ft?


keith

[Whwoz]

@AdrianaG, you may find that tomatoes are perennials, surviving for several years under your conditions if you let them. Keep a good eye out for disease as that may limit the plants lifespan more than the weather. Maybe consider replacing the plants around a year old and perhaps stagger your plantings so that you have plants of different ages in the ground at all times.

Don't think we have anyone else from Colombia on here, I maybe wrong there, which means that you are on a great position to trial things and learn. Glogs here, think of them as a garden diary, are a great way to keep track of what you are doing.

[pepperhead212]

Welcome to the forum! Looking forward to hearing about your experiences there!

[AdrianaG]

how did you end up in columbia? how long did it take you to get used
to living at 7000 ft?


keith

I was born in Colombia to an American mother and Colombian father. Lived in the US from age 16-67 and decided to return 4 years ago. Getting used to 7,000 feet was easy. Living in such a perfect climate is a delight! Occasionally I will run into issues with baking at high altitude, my bible is a book called Pie in the Sky.

[AdrianaG]

@AdrianaG, you may find that tomatoes are perennials, surviving for several years under your conditions if you let them.

I recall reading about a grower in New Zealand who had a 40’ long indeterminate tomato vine wrapped around the perimeter of his home greenhouse.

I will be curious to see how the dwarfs perform under extended growing conditions. I definitely will consider planting replacements periodically, if only to control their size. I assume I can do this via suckers.

[AdrianaG]

Glogs here, think of them as a garden diary, are a great way to keep track of what you are doing.

Is there a good example of a glog you can share with me?

[Frosti]

Welcome to the Junction!

[GoDawgs]

Welcome to the Junction from here in Georgia! Wow, year round gardening in just about perfect growing conditions. Woo hoo! It will be interesting hearing about your gardening adventures and new stuff you try that's not available here in the US.

Glogs can be found at viewforum.php?f=65
That section is under the Home tab. Just click on New Topic, give it a name and then keep posting under your original post using Post Reply. Easy peasy!

[bower]

Bienvenido! Welcome Adriana! So excited to hear about your tomatoes and everything else in your garden.
I lived in Colombia for 5 years (aged 9 to 13) and will never forget your beautiful country.. We lived in Bogota but we did have the opportunity to travel around a bit, on our holidays. It was amazing how you could drive into a different climate zone, just by going down the mountain on an hour's drive. So many things about Colombia were just amazing.
Being from Newfoundland, there were a thousand fruits and other foods we'd never tasted. (At that time late 1960's the supermarkets only carried the barest bones of imported food: cellopack tomatoes completely tasteless, and iceberg lettuce, likewise. So we were strictly carrot potato turnip onion type eaters.) It was life changing for sure, to experience the food rich environment.
So I will be extra thrilled at any glimpses you provide of this wonderful place.

[Whwoz]

Glogs here, think of them as a garden diary, are a great way to keep track of what you are doing.

Is there a good example of a glog you can share with me?

Any number of them @AdrianaG, just go to the Glog link viewforum.php?f=65 and check them out. @GoDawgs has the longest, I have one, The Garden of Woz, both of these are multi-year examples, while others update them as yearly glogs, moving onto a new one every year. How you set up one is up to you.

[worth1]

Welcome from Central Texas.

[AdrianaG]

Glogs can be found at viewforum.php?f=65
That section is under the Home tab. Just click on New Topic, give it a name and then keep posting under your original post using Post Reply. Easy peasy!

Thank you for the Glog link. I lived in Georgia for 30 years over 3 different time frames! As a 2x Georgia Tech grad and mother and mother-in-law of UGA grads, I have split loyalties, especially since my daughter was in the “Turncoat” Marching Band .

[Harry Cabluck]

Welcome from Austin, Texas...25 miles northwest of Bastrop, Texas...home of worth1.

[leftylogan]

Welcome! I've spent a lot of time at 7000 feet but with a traditional mountain climate. Nothing that lush wow

[JenLovesTomato]

Hello from CT! It will be interesting to see how long your plants can go. Being in CT the frost kills my plants. I suspect if frost didn't come, fungus would eventually do them in. However over the years of reading about other's gardens, I've seen it said that the plants will sort of peter out and stop producing tomatoes at some point. Not sure how long that is, if I recall, the better part of a year. If you don't get disease, you could just cut off a sucker and root it and not have to start over from seed. That would be a time savings. I have also seen someone who had a cherry tomato plant (I think it was sun sugar) that was HUGE and had been growing for over a year (don't remember the exact timeframe). It just kept going.