Here are three other tomatoes.
Here is a pic of my melon plants. One is a cantaloupe and one is honey dew.
So I'll take this chance to explain what the hell I'm doing here. Look up at that second picture of the three tomato plants. What I did was to start the seedlings in a little "plug" in a styrofoam raft system. Once they outgrew that, I put them in the cubes which are wrapped in white plastic. Those cubes are made out of rockwool http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mineral_wool
I did this for all the plants I planned on putting in the greenhouse. (6 different tomato plants, 2 pepper plants (blockbuster bell pepper, and jalopeno pepper, and two melon plants). Those are wrapped on the sides (to keep moisture from being exposed to sunlight and thus facilitating algae growth), but are open on the bottom so the roots can grow into the rockwool slabs that are in the trays. So the individual trays (I've got 4 of them running) are 3 feet long each, and I'm putting three plants in each one. I left the plastic on the top of them (cut out the bottom plastic for drainage) for the same reason: to avoid algae growth. Algae growth will change the ph of the nutrient solution very quickly, reducing the nutrient uptake by the plants.
The black plastic hose line you see is the input line. There is a 10 gallon rubbermaid container under the benches holding the plants. In the container I have a water pump that is periodically (15 minutes out of every hour during the day, and every two hours at night) programmed to deliver nutrient solution to the plants by offshoots of quarter inch hose straight into the individual rockwool cubes. Then the solution drains to the bottom, into the tray, and is piped back into the nutrient tank (fed by gravity).
In order to allow the roots go from the cubes into the slab, I cut out sections of the plastic and placed the cubes on the slabs. 5 days after putting the plants in the greenhouse (I did that on March 27th), the roots of some of the plants are already busting through the bottom of the cubes and probing into the rockwool slabs. Eventually, the three plants will share the entire slab and their roots will completely fill of all of the available area, allowing me to grow gigantic plants.
You might be asking, how will I keep the plants upright? Well, I'm going to train them up to the ceiling, growing them vertically. I'll do this by attaching them to a string which is hooked to the ceiling with a retracting mechanism which will keep the line taught as the tomato or melon plants grows vertically. I'm also going to grow cucumbers like this but I haven't started them yet (b/c I spaced on it. I still haven't planted them. /facepalm)
