Wisconsin Tomato Growing Contest

Photo/Michael Sears 

Read an article from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel online. 

Today, she is reaping the benefits of a university experiment that challenges city dwellers with a simple question: How much food can you harvest from three small potted plants?

That is the premise of a program launched by the University of Wisconsin Extension this summer in several Waukesha neighborhoods.

About 60 families are participating — and competing — to see who can put the most food on the table using potted tomato, cucumber and pepper plants.

It is a puzzle why this university funded project did not include sub-irrigated (self-watering) planters to grow these vegetables. The tomato plants growing in drench and drain planters in the photo above look anything but robust. At a minimum there should have been a comparitive effort to measure the difference between sub-irrigation and top watering.

A Google site search on the University of Wisconsin Extension website reveals no hits on the words self-watering, sub-irrigation or Earthbox. There were over 20 hits on the words "raised bed". How did our horticultural education system become so retrogressive, so change resistant?