Question:

What is Topsy turvi technique of farming?

by  |  earlier

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How plants grow upside down? Which cropes are grown? How they are grown? What about watering and fertilizing them? Can it be done on big scale?

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  1. Good morning Arthur, topsy turvvi planters are a new fad gardening product here (anyway) on direct marketing. Basically it is just bag culture that is suspended and allows the plant to grow down from the bag bottom. I have seen it on the television and they like to show it done with tomato plants. I would not think all plants would grow well this way. The tissues in a plant that move water and ions from the roots to the leaves and also the other direction after photosynthesis are designed by nature to work with gravity. Vines like some tomatoes as well as some others would be alright as they would cascade anyway but other plants won't do so well. Suspended bags need support for the ever increasing weight of media, solution and plant, much more than bag culture on the ground supporting the plant alone. This fad idea would like you to believe that you can grow better plants upside down, and can not be supported as a valid hypothesis. To use them large scale even if you made your own would reqire a lot more support and that equates to money. Floor bag culture which is in essence open system hydroponics is big, proven and productive. When the plant, under year round culture gets too long for the greenhouse and support, with the lower leaves having been cleaned off, it is easy to lower the vine a bit and coil the vine like an old green hose or rope. You can get two years out of a vine. I saw some trellises in Iraq. I thought at first from a distance they were grapes but they were tomatoes and may have been older than two years (by the look of the little fruits). So, for all it seemed, it would be more to set up and maintain, even watering them upside down was just novel, and didn't appear to be very sturdy but hard to tell. Floor bags are not either.


  2. The only thing that I have seen on it is the Topsy Turvy tomato planters on TV. It is just a gimmick to sell the planters and supplies. There is no advantage to raising plants upside down. Plants have evolved over generations to be grown up right. While the tomatoes grown in this Topsy Turvy planter may yield some tomatoes, the same plants, given the same care, would yield more planted upright. It is just a novelty item that won't last long on the market.

  3. There are a large amount of crops that are grown upside down in a manner of speaking. Tubers and root crops, for example. Why not let vegetables grow in the sun, where they can photosynthesize more efficiently?

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