The 2023 GVGO Mike Demars Memorial Tomato Contest is now closed. Congratulations goes out to team 5 (Joel Jarvis, Kirk Poirier and myself) for winning this year. Team 5 had a winning team weight of 25.45 lbs. The winners will receive free membership for 2024 and a GVGO hat. It was a tough growing season for many growers but we still managed to have12 growers achieve new personal best tomato weights this year. That was good to see! Hopefully everyone had fun growing tomatoes this year and we can do this again next year.

Here is the latest update for the 2023 Mike Demars Memorial Tomato Contest.

I thought I would start this diary to record the tomatoes that Elaine and I submit to the 2023 Mike Demars Memorial Tomato Contest.   So far our tomatoes are not particularly large. I’m mostly doing this for transparency.   First here are Elaine’s entries for team 11 2.13 lbs This one is 2.34 lbs My entries for Team 5 1.77 lbs This next one is 3.48 lbs (team 5)

The teams have been picked for the 2023 Tomato contest. Have fun and good luck to everyone!

I thought I would start this diary exclusively for a watermelon scale project that I have started to work on. This will be an ongoing endeavor because I’m sort of making things up as I go. Last March, I watched Frank Mudd give a presentation to a group of giant watermelon growers down south. I found it very fascinating to hear that Frank (and other growers) use scales under their melons to monitor the growth. It seemed like an important tool, so that you can see what affects the growth of the melons throughout the season. I knew I couldn’t justify buying scales so I got thinking of ideas to make my own. After a lot of research I had an idea to build a scale using load cells. I don’t know if this has ever been done DIY before with watermelons. I do know that some beekeepers build these types of scales for monitoring the weight of beehives and home brewers use these scales to monitor keg weight. My thought was to modify the scale to fit under the frame of our watermelon hammocks. The first thing I wanted to do was build a prototype scale just to prove to myself that this might be feasible. If it worked, I would expand the design to fit under the watermelon hammocks. I was able to purchase all the components that I need form Amazon and eBay. Pictured below are all of the electrical components that I will need to make this scale. This is a close up of the loads cells. They are each rated for 50kg’s and I will be using 4 to make the scale, so the total rating of the scale will be 200 kg’s or 440 lbs. A load cell is a piece of spring metal that has a strain gauge firmly attached. As weight is pushed down on the metal (bump in the center) the resulting change to the resistance in the strain gauge can be measured as voltage. This voltage change is directly proportional to the amount of weight applied to the load cell. So the amount of weight can be calculated from the load cells output. The load cells have to be wired in a very specific way for them to work correctly. I wasn’t going to make this into a “how to do this” type of thing but if someone wanted more specific details of what I am doing I could provide that. To tell you the truth, I don’t really know yet if this will work out for me, but I’m going to keep on with it hopefully until I get a functioning scale. Or hit some sort of roadblock that I cannot pass. The load cells have to be connected to an HX711 amplifier, because the change in resistance in the strain gauge is such a small value it must be amplified so that the microcontroller can read it. These are surprisingly inexpensive. I bought 4 load cells and it came with an HX711 amplifier for $10 on Amazon. The pins have to be soldered on to the board. I need some sort of display to readout the weight on the scale. I have decided to use this OLED display. It is very small but with the right sized font it should be just what I need. I paid a little less than $10 for this one on eBay. The microcontroller is next on the list. This is basically a small computer and is the brains of the whole thing. This is a genuine Arduino Uno and I paid $42 for this one on Amazon. You can buy a Chinese clone board for $8 that is supposed to work just as well. I did buy one at first but couldn’t get it to work for me. This is the part of the project that has caused me the most trouble. This board uses C++ computer language to program it and until a few weeks ago I didn’t have a clue what that was. The code must be written with all the information in it that you will need to operate the scale as designed. It will only accept one sketch (a fancy name for lines of code) at a time so everything must be compiled into one sketch in order for it to work properly. For instance, most scales will re tare to zero every time the scale is powered off and then back on even if it has weight sitting on it. So I had to write the code so that I could tare out the weight of the watermelon hammock at the start of the season and then have the weight of the melon saved in the memory when it was powered off. I’m going to power it with a 9v battery and just turn it on once a day. The scale also needed to be calibrated so that it will be fairly accurate. I made a small proto type scale (pictured below) and have it connected to my computer with a USB cable for programing. I joined an online Arduino forum where I had to ask a lot of questions about programing and microcontrollers. I was helped by some amazing people from around the world and now after a lot of hours of trial and error I have a working sketch that works exactly like I want it to. I should be able to save this sketch for future scales. I plan to make two scales if this one works. I have all the electronics just sitting on a chair for testing purposes. I have a plywood board over the top of the loads cells. This next picture shows what is under the plywood. The load cell are recessed into the wooden frame. I soldered new wire to lengthen the wires on the load cells so that they would be long enough to work on the real scale. This is a close up of the area that the load cells fit into. I used a router to make a recess in the wood so that when the metal tab bends slightly it has room below. This next image shows the OLED display connected temporarily to a solderless breadboard just for testing. The scale seems to work well. It retains the last weight in the memory when I power it off and the scale is fairly accurate. My next task is to design a weatherproof case that I will be able to house the electronics shown below. Not the breadboard, but everything else. I need to be able to see the OLED so I need a design with a window for viewing the display. I thought of a lot of different designs I could have possibly used but eventually decided I would make a wooden box to house all of the components. To me it made the most sense. I enjoy woodworking and I could make a wooden box very easily. I will seal it up very well and apply some spar varnish. This is the inside of the front panel. I have a recess around the OLED window big enough to place a glass microscope slide to act as a window. I will use silicone to attach this glass to the wood. The OLED will be held up to the window for viewing with wingnuts. This is the dry fit. This is the finished box after 3 coats of spar varnish. I made a silicon gasket for under the lid to seal out the weather. I also did some wood burning on the box. Now I need to install all of the components into the box and use a 9 volt battery to supply power. Here I have it connected to the prototype scale. The OLED display is held up behind the glass window. It seems to work great. Now, I need to build a larger frame for the actual scale and get some wire loom to put the wires into. That will be several weeks down the road. I need to concentrate my efforts right now in the garden to hopefully get a melon worthy of putting on a scale.

The 2022 GVGO Mike Demars Tomato Contest is now closed. Congratulations goes out to team 5 (John Butler, Art Johnston and Emily Summerhayes) for winning this year. They had a winning team weight of 27.13 lbs. They will be receiving GVGO bling. We had 12 growers achieve new personal bests. That was nice to see! Hopefully everyone had fun growing tomatoes this year and we can do this again next year.

These are the entries I have so far. Three personal bests this year already. Don’t forget you can enter your smaller tomatoes first just in case something bad happens to your bigger ones. It doesn’t matter how many entries you put in. I will just record your 2 largest of the season for the contest. Good growing everyone!

We are starting to get a few entries into the GVGO tomato contest. Yesterday, John weighed this monster tomato. 3.576 kg or 7.88 lbs. Way to go John! Zeke would be smiling.

Welcome to our 2022 growing diary. So far this year everything is far behind last year’s start to the season. We have not been able to get into our patch yet, because it is too wet. Last weekend it was very close to being dry enough. We were able to apply a layer of manure. It was too wet last fall to do this so we had to do it now. Of course the rain came the next day. Today we got several trailer loads of coco coir from our neighbour. He removes the used growing medium from a local cannabis producer. It is stockpiled and allowed to break down. The picture below shows part of the large pile. The fresh stuff is on the right and the decomposed stuff is on the left. It works very well to loosen up our clay soil. The picture below shows our young watermelon seedlings along with some bushel gourd seedlings. Hopefully, in the next few days we will be grafting the watermelon to the bushel gourd. This will be 2 weeks later than last year. We had a lot of trouble this year getting the BG to germinate. That set us back a little. We plan to grow 2 pumpkins and 1 squash this year. We started these plants a bit later as well. We started the germination process on the plants below last Saturday (April 23). So they are just nicely out of the soil. We have a couple of our 1747.5 as back up plants. For pumpkin we are going with the same seeds as last year. The 2118 Barron has always given us a heavy pumpkin, is very heat tolerant and is a very aggressive plant. Also going with the 2200 est Geddes again. This was also a very aggressive plant with a lot of potential (we think). The squash we are going with is Harley Sproule’s 1507.5. Thanks for the seeds Harley. It’s been a long time since we grew a squash. This next picture is a look at our cabbage plants. We started these mid-February. They are from our own seed that we harvested last fall. Finally, we would like to encourage all the GVGO members out there to start a diary this year. We can all learn from each other.

We are going to start our 2021 diary with a little experimentation. We haven’t grown watermelon for a number of years and have decided that we would like to try a couple of plants this year. After doing some research online we have decided we would like to learn to graft watermelon. Some of the benefits of watermelon grafting would be disease resistance and plant vigor. This will be totally new for us and we do not really know how it will turn out. We may have to grow traditionally if we can’t master the grafting process. Apparently, one of the most important things to have after grafting is to have some sort of healing chamber for the newly grafted plants to go into. This healing chamber needs to be kept at and a very high relative humidity at first and then slowly reduced over the course of a week. The grafts need to be in the dark for the first two days and then slowly introduced to light a little longer each day. The picture below shows our newly built healing chamber (24” X 28” inside dimensions) with the control box on the right. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________ The control box contains a SHT2000 temperature and humidity controller. It is wired in such a way so that one half of the outlet supplies power to the humidifier and the other half delivers power to the heater. It is very easy to make changes to the settings to either raise or lower the heat/ humidity inside the box. The red display is the temperature and the blue is the humidity. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________ We started some seeds January 15 just for practice. We decide to use bushel gourd as the rootstock mainly because it was available to us. Unfortunately, we had very poor germination of the bushel gourds and we were only able to get 3 seedlings started from that batch. Today, we decided to try the first practice grafts. There are a number of different grafting techniques, but we decided for this first try to go with the one cotyledon graft. This is one of the bushel gourd seedlings. They were not the healthiest looking plants but it’s all we had. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Here is the same plant after the true leaves as well as one of the cotyledons were cut off on an angle down the stem. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Next, is the watermelon scion that was cut on the same angle to hopefully match the cut on the bushel gourd. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Next a grafting clip was put on the stem ________________________________________________________________________________________________________ The seedlings were put inside the healing chamber and covered to keep light out. The humidifier is just a small bottle cap humidifier that fits inside a water bottle. The heater is a germination mat under the wire rack. The black probe on the top right is connected to the SHT 2000 controller. It measures both the temperature and the humidity.

We are going to try to keep a diary of our growing season this year. This will be the start of our 26th season that Elaine and I have been growing giant pumpkins. It is unquestionably the strangest start to any season with all that is going on in the country and the world. This will be the first time that we have ever started a season not knowing for sure if it will be possible to attend a weigh-off in the fall. We have decided to put in 2 AG’s this year and hope for the best. We live 20 minutes south of Port Elgin along the shores of Lake Huron. Living so close to the shore of the lake has its pros and cons. In the spring time the lake really hurts us by keeping the temperature down with the cold winds coming off the lake. In the fall it helps us because the lake gives us heat off its warmed water. We rarely get a frost until well into October. We are going to use soil heating cables for the first time this year. Hoping that it will help us with our cooler spring weather. We purchased the cables from Amazon---140W/120V/1.7A 48 feet long. They are supposed to have a built in thermostat. Time will tell if they are any good. Here we have attached the cable to some plastic fencing with tie wraps. Trying to keep a 3” spacing as per the instructions. Still have not been able to get into patch yet to install cables. The instructions say to lay the cables on a bed of sand We have started the germination process today. The seeds we will grow this year, if they germinate will be the 2016 Lancaster & 2118 Barron, plus a couple of backups.