San Diego Tomatoes in Lath Houses

[LDx4]

Today I learned how to resize pictures and post them on Tville, thanks to some helpful Tville members: http://www.tomatoville.com/showthread.php?t=26363

So now I can offer some photos of our tomato-growing setup in our small (about 1/5 acre) backyard. I'd been growing a few tomato plants each summer for many years, but it's only been in the last two years that my tomato addiction has really taken hold. You see, here in San Diego, we have an epidemic of tree rats, and since we live adjacent to open space, they are especially bad. I would lose most of my small crop to the rats each summer. So I never had the space or motivation to grow more than a few plants.

Then in 2010 we had a bad series of rain storms and our old wooden retaining wall that separated the small, flat part of the yard from the upper slope gave way. Luckily, my husband is in the contruction trade, so he built some concrete+block retaining walls to replace the old wooden one. As part of that construction, he built a gravel pad to put a Harbor Freight 10x12ft greenhouse up. But it quickly got too hot in the greenhouse for my tomatoes. My husband, a very resourceful guy, realized that he could replace the polycarbonate greenhouse panels with sheets of rib lath, a type of reinforcement screen used with exterior stucco/plastering. The rib lath sheets are exactly the same width as the polycarbonate, so they only needed to be shortened. One idea led to another, and he then designed three more "lath houses" using wood frames with rib lath and polycarbonate for the roofing. He terraced the slope and built the other houses on the slope, increasing the size of my growing area.

Now I can grow my tomatoes inside the lath houses and the rats can't get to them! Last summer I grew 75 plants in 15 gal containers. You can see some of the harvest in the pictures. This year, he is going to build two more lath houses at the top of the property, as I am planning for 200 plants this year -- all to be protected from birds, rats, rabbits and other wildlife.

I've started a small business selling tomatoes locally. You can also see more photos at www.lathhousegardens.com.

I've learned so much from Tomatoville and its members - thank you for letting me share!

Lyn