What separates the commercial tomato types?

Fruit size and how the fruit is sold. Truss is harvested on the vine as a cluster, cherry and cocktail are smaller-fruited market classes, and beef is the large slicing fruit. Plant load, harvest rhythm and handling differ between them.

Is one greenhouse design right for every tomato type?

The climate envelope is shared by all tomato types, but the house is specified for the type being grown. Internal transport, packing capacity and crop support differ enough between the types that the choice belongs in the brief before the house is designed.

Tomato — DutchGreenhouses

Q: Why is tomato called the reference crop of the modern glasshouse?

Most of what a modern greenhouse does was worked out on tomato. Year-round supply, high-wire cultivation, carbon dioxide dosing, screening strategy and recirculating irrigation all matured on tomato before they moved to other crops.

Tomato is the reference crop of Dutch protected horticulture, and most of what a modern greenhouse does was worked out on it. Year-round supply, high-wire cultivation, carbon dioxide dosing, screening strategy and recirculating irrigation all matured on tomato before they moved to other crops. A buyer entering tomato is entering the most documented crop in the sector, which means the design questions are well understood and the competition is experienced.

What the crop needs

The plant is a long-cycle, indeterminate fruiting vegetable grown on substrate and carried on a high wire. It is planted once and harvested for most of the year, so the greenhouse is not sized for a peak week but for a continuous rhythm of setting, ripening and picking. Because the crop is in place for so long, the structure and the climate system carry the whole season rather than a short window, and a shortcoming in either compounds across every truss the plant sets.

What separates the varieties

What splits the commercial types is fruit size and how the fruit is sold. Truss tomato is harvested on the vine as a cluster and is the Dutch export standard. Cherry and cocktail are smaller-fruited market classes with their own plant load, harvest labour and quality expectations. Beef is a large-fruited class with a different truss structure entirely. The climate recipe is shared across the whole crop, but plant load, harvest interval and handling differ enough that the house is specified for the type rather than for tomato in general.

DutchGreenhouses® specifies the structure, climate control, screening and irrigation together around the tomato type, its market and the local climate, so the envelope suits the fruit being sold rather than tomato in general. Get in touch to plan a tomato greenhouse for your market.

Tomato

The varieties

TOV / truss tomatoes

The Dutch export standard, sold on the vine.

Cherry tomatoes

Small fruit, high count, and labour as the deciding cost.

Cocktail tomatoes

Between cherry and truss, and a class in its own right.

Beef tomatoes

The large-fruited slicing class, and the load it puts on a house.

Grown close, picked ripe

Tomato is mostly water, and the rest is the reason it is eaten. Vitamin C, potassium and the carotenoid that gives ripe fruit its colour all sit in that small remainder, and all of them are strongest in fruit that ripened on the plant rather than in a crate.

That is where distance starts to matter. Fruit with a long journey ahead is picked before it is ready, because a ripe tomato does not travel. It finishes colouring in transit and arrives looking finished, but the sugars and the acids that were still being laid down when it was cut never arrive at all. The cultivar on the label is the same. The product is not.

Growing near the market removes the compromise. A greenhouse close to the people who eat the crop can pick at ripeness and deliver the same week, and it can do that in February as readily as in July, which is the part a field cannot promise. The shorter the distance between the plant and the plate, the less of the crop is spent getting there.