THE HOUWELING GROUP

DELTA, BRITISH COLUMBIA

Gone are the days when flake-like tomato seeds are planted in the nesting cavities of an egg carton—at least for professional growers like Ruben Houweling. He has fine-tuned a process that takes Dutch seeds to 20-inch transplants for commercial growers to buy in 6 weeks.

The Houweling Group, a precision greenhouse operation in Delta, British Columbia, produces seedling tomato plants for about half of the commercial greenhouses on the western coast of the U.S. and Canada. These plants produce the tomatoes that are sold in many grocery stores.

“To plant a seed and plant a crop is to believe in tomorrow,” says Houweling, who started in the nursery that belonged to his grandfather Cornelius more than 35 years ago.

Each seed is deposited into a plug to settle in for 2 weeks. Then, workers graft a fruiting seedling to a root-stock seedling. This new plant goes into a humidity chamber for a week for the graft to fuse. The grafted seedling is then planted into a 4-inch cube of rock wool, an inert substrate.

One week later, these cubes are placed in a greenhouse nursery to be nurtured by frequent doses of fertilized water. When the first flowers appear, the transplants are shipped to the growers.

Despite the assistance of state-of-the-art lighting and irrigation, the greenhouse is in tune with each season’s climatic variations. Says Houweling: “Especially through the fall, winter, and spring, we are aware of available light and the angle of the Sun. We still need to harvest as much free solar energy as possible.”

Houweling reports that they plan to expand the seedling service in the near future, another ex-ample of the current high-density trend in agriculture to produce more on less land, while protect-ing plants from the harshest elements of weather. (continued)

Photo: The Houweling Group