 Hello and welcome to Little Garden on the Prairies. Today we are having a sneak peek here at my grow tent that I have got a whole bunch of plants started indoors using the Kratki hydroponic method. And today we're going to specifically look at this indeterminate sun gold cherry tomato. As you can see it is getting huge and it's starting to get a little bit close to the light so I'm going to show you how I am going to try and just prune it down a bit get it staked so it's more secure. I also need to check the nutrients in this tomato. It's been sucking up the water like crazy and we will do some pH testing and EC tests on it to see how it's doing. So before we get going on the tomato pruning I just wanted to show you a couple other things that are growing down here in my indoor garden. These are the two strawberries that I also took from the garden. I pulled them out of some pots washed off the roots and then set them up in the Kratki method here. And if you have a look here at what they look like when I brought them in you can see that they have really grown. They have lots of blooms on them now and they are drinking up the water not too fast. So my plan is to mix up some new nutrients and refresh these two containers with a blend that is at the blooming stage or the fruiting stage. So that will be a different blend than what I originally put them into and we will see if that will help with the fruit production here. And here is my lettuce which is looking amazing. Just look at those leaves of lettuce. I should be able to get a salad out of this for myself tomorrow so I may be coming down and picking a little variety I got the leafy greens and the arugula coming here really good. These tubs work really well for keeping the LJ out. As you can see these roots on my lettuces are really nice and white and looking super healthy. So with it was only about 30 days ago that I planted up these cuttings they were taken from my tomatoes out in my outside garden and I just rooted them up in water and then set them up in the crack key hydroponic method. So here's what they look like after they were planted up and put into the grow tent and as you can see the sun gold cherry is really taken off now. So as I said I'm going to try and keep it at about this height so any more growth that happens here at the top I probably will start cutting it back. I'm just checking my plant to see all the areas where I do have some fruit coming. So I hope you can see this but like I said I have some couple down here, there's some here, here, and I can see some more coming here at the top. So I want to try to figure out how to get this kind of standing nice and tall and then I'm going to trim off some of these branches that maybe aren't really needed. They're just taking up extra energy. I'm going to start off at the bottom by just cutting these guys back. So I've cut off three there. So what I'm working with here is just some clips that I ordered online for plants. I got these little plastic things that you can wrap around the stems and then these little clips work well. I've just connected some jute rope to it so it's got something to work from and have it tied to the to the bar at the top of my grow tent here. So I'm just trying to find a good spot on the plant to attach this. So I'm going to put it under here where there's a bit of a branch that kind of keeps it from sliding up and then I need to just adjust my rope. I haven't quite figured out a really effective way to do this other than to just wrap some of this excess rope in my clip here until I get it to a good length and just grab the kind of holds that's secure. It's a little bit loose so usually then I just take my rope here. Take my rope and just wrap it around the tomato a little bit. That gives it a little more stability. I'm just going to cut away some more of these branches that aren't really needed. They don't have any blooms on them. They're just adding a little weight and taking energy from the rest of the plant. I don't know, I could be a little bit scissor happy here but I think it'd be okay. We've got lots of blooms coming here. So this is how it looks after a good trimming. I can see now that I do have a little sucker here coming and I'm going to take that out. Sometimes you just miss them and all of a sudden they're huge and I see another one coming down here so I'm just going to pinch that off. Like I say, we still have some blooms coming there. I'm kind of contemplating whether I should hack this piece off here or not. It probably was a sucker that got away on me. I'm going to leave it for now. It's hard to chop them off once they get this big because it's got some nice blooms coming but it does make it a little more challenging to stake this up properly. I think we'll leave it like that and now it's time to mix up some nutrients and give this tomato a drink. Okay so the nutrients are mixed up and I'm going to now just do the pH and the EC test on them to see if we're on par with where we want to be. So again I'm using the three-part Holland secret. So when I first set up my tomatoes and the strawberries I use the early vegetative blend here which usually has a higher amount of the of the grow and a lower amount of the bloom. So now I am mixing it up at the early flower stage which has more bloom to it, a little bit less grow. So basically it's your NPK levels that change. So I've got it mixed up and I have my little chart here so we're doing tomatoes trying to get a range of two to four for the EC pH somewhere just 6.5. So I'm just going to pour some into this jar so we can measure it easily. So usually with the pH meter it's about a 30 second hold in the water to get a accurate reading. So it looks like it's going to sit at about 6.25 which is good. Now we will try the EC. I usually use EC reading over PPM just because that's just the one I choose to use and this is pretty much an instant reading. Sitting at 1614 which is like a 1.6 so it's a little bit low compared to my EC suggestion here on this card. So if your EC levels are too low then you can just add a bit more nutrients just to try to bring that number up. If your EC level is too high then you would just add some just water to your nutrients to kind of bring that EC level down. So as I said mine is a little bit low. I would like to have my tomatoes in the two to four range of the EC so it's a little bit low. So I'm just going to add a little bit more of each of these nutrients and we'll mix it up and see if that helps. Okay so I added a little bit more nutrients to my four liter jug here and I'm like I don't want to get too technical or make people think that this is something that you really have to get all technical about because then it just kind of scares people from trying this but basically the ratios of this measurement that I was using today was like a one to one to two. So just to top up these nutrients a little bit more I added just one mil, one mil, two mils of this and we're going to see how it tests now. I said it's just kind of trial and error. Okay so we'll check the pH again just to see if there's any change there. So the pH is just below six at 5.96 so not too bad. It did go down a little bit. Let's see what the EC did. I'm hoping that it went up. Yes and so it did go up to 2100 which is 2.1 so that's kind of at the low low end of my EC scale that I wanted at. So I'm just going to leave it at that for now. Pretty sure this tomato is going to drink up this water in a week and I'll be mixing up another batch so I'll maybe put it at the full flower bloom stage and my EC level might be a little bit higher. But I think we're good to go. I'm also trying to keep records of what I'm doing. Again something that I'm not very good at but I like to just make sure I record the day that I'm adjusting what the pH and the EC levels that I am using and it's good just for future reference to see how things are doing and kind of see what's working what's not working. I did crack key hydroponics for two years without doing any pH or EC testing or keeping track and I had a lot of luck with things growing just fine. So it's just something that I kind of got more interested in and thought maybe I should you know try it and see if it makes a difference to kind of monitor these things a little closer. So my roadster determinate tomato here still got quite a bit of nutrients left it hasn't drank it too fast I'm just going to leave it for now being as it's not really at a flowering stage yet and we're just going to top this up. You always want to make sure with crack key that you leave room for air for the roots they need the air to breathe so you don't want to overfill your container so I usually fill it about halfway to three quarters and make sure there's an inch or two of space in the roots so that they can keep breathing because you're not using an air stone or a pump of any kind it needs that air to stay alive and thrive. So maybe that I need to work on my stability method here the string seems to be working but once you get the fan blowing it does move it around quite a bit so I will keep you updated on the progress of my indeterminate tomato. So if you enjoyed watching this week's video on the progress of my indoor growing please hit that like button and I'd love to hear your comments and if you're an expert in hydroponics and see anything that I am doing drastically wrong or have any suggestions please feel free to let me know in the comments I'm by no means an expert in this I am just learning as I go oh it's great to have all this fresh vegetables in the middle of winter that you've grown yourself so please if you haven't already done so hit that subscribe button click on the notification bell so you don't miss out on future videos coming to the channel happy gardening