Inside Iceland’s Friðheimar greenhouses, they are growing tomatoes all year long. That was the case when I visited in mid-May when there’s 20 hours of daylight. It’s also true in the middle of December when, despite the freezing temperatures and five hours of daylight, they are still growing nearly half of the country’s tomatoes.
Last month Icelandair introduced direct flights from Pittsburgh and to mark the occasion they invited me to tour the country and report on it for KDKA, Pittsburgh’s CBS station. I saw massive waterfalls and striking black beaches and impressive geysers – which were all incredible – but as an unabashed plant enthusiast my favorite stop was Friðheimar.
Friðheimar is a family business that got its start when Knútur Rafn Ármann and Helena Hermundardóttir bought a couple of old greenhouses in 1995. They were growing produce seasonally at first but in 2002 they challenged themselves to grow all year round. They heat the greenhouses with geothermal energy – the water they’re piping up from underground is nearly boiling – and depending on the time of year overhead lighting compensates for the lack of Icelandic sunshine.
This method of growing tomatoes looks a lot different than the tomatoes currently growing in my backyard raised beds. At Friðheimar they plant each tomato in a spongy block which, after sprouting, is planted directly into a bag of soil. They call it a hybrid hydroponic system.
As the tomato plant grows they prune it judiciously and wind the central stalk along the base of the growing rows so that each plant ends up growing around thirty feet long. I used my finger to trace one tomato plant as it weaves around the operation producing tiny tomatoes yard after yard after yard. Each plant produces tomatoes for ten months before they replace it with a new start. It’s wild to witness.
To pollinate these tomato plants they’ve imported bees from the Netherlands who buzz around the greenhouses visiting each yellow bloom.
After expanding their growing operation, Knútur and Helena opened a restaurant inside their greenhouse where they now serve a variety of delicious tomato-centric dishes. I’ve had greenhouse tomatoes before and often they’re not as tasty as those grown in my backyard but these Friðheimar were remarkably sweet. The staff member I chatted with says that’s because of the high mineral content in the local water.
I don’t think a greenhouse restaurant like this would be possible in America due to the bacteria and insects that could sneak in from outside as hundreds of folks stop by for lunch. As I understand it, these threats to tomato plants don’t exist in Iceland due to the country’s harsh climate.
There was something magical sitting in a glass box densely populated with blooms and ripe tomatoes and the occasional white-tailed bumblebee. It might be around fifty degrees outside but inside here it was cozy, thanks to the geothermal heat, and the tomato soup was delicious.
You can watch a short video I filmed at Friðheimar here
Do you grow anything in a greenhouse? Have you ever eaten lunch in one? I’d love to hear about it.
And one more thing: I love this NY Times article about a botanist discovering false mermaid-weed in Vermonth for the first time in a century. I especially loved this bit when the botanist calls her friend:
“She said ‘Are you sitting down?’ and immediately I knew she’d found Floerkea,” he said of the phone call. “It was the right time of year.”
Soooo cool! When I lived in San Antonio we took a tomato growing class down there and the educator had 40 foot tall tomato cages. We were renting so we didn't try that but I never thought about how tomato plants can really get long. We need to adopt a different model in the US. I also learned to feed the plants a seaweed based additive!
I went to work in Bulgaria for two months in 1988 (when it was still communist). It is of course much farther south but Bulgaria does get winter snows. Despite the spartan variety of foods available they had amazing tomatoes in the middle of winter. A coworker took me on a tour of their greenhouses after I kept asking how they grew such sweet tomatoes. The greenhouses were decidedly low tech---the bottom half of the structure was below ground, only about 4 feet on top exposed to the elements. Being dug in the greenhouse took advantage of latent underground heat. The tomatoes were planted in whatever soil was there. I don't recall any heating systems but not entirely sure being 36 years later now.