Update. It has been just shy of 3 weeks. I lost a few peppers, but I expected to lose a few as I learned the ins and outs of hydroponics. The tomatoes are growing like weeds, and I'm starting to train them, so I can hopefully grow them in a screen of green style trellis. The second picture is a close-up of one of my Cherokee Purple tomato plants. A few of the leaves are starting to turn brown. Any idea what this might be? I water/feed all of the plants on the same schedule, and I'm not seeing it on any of the other toms.

You can train the taller plants vertically to keep a certain canopy height. This will also increase production potential by a great deal.

I grew tomatoes indoors one year. I mean I often start tomatoes in the spring in a room with a lot of windows, but one year I decided to take tomatoes right through the winter. I chose indeterminate tomatoes which I grew from seed. For varieties I used everything from cherry tomatoes through medium sized, and into large beefsteak tomatoes, too. Always with varieties that I knew I liked. I got large buckets of dirt, 2 gallons to 4 gallons PER TOMATO PLANT (altogether I had 20 of them). I filled these buckets with garden soil from my garden. In mid summer I planted a new young tomato plant into each of them, along with a nice tomato tower. When fall came and temps started to drop, I moved them inside. I put them in my unfinished basement. Concrete floors, temperatures in the lower 70s, all winter, no natural light. I bought cheap fluorescent shoplights and literally covered the ceiling with them, and hung them down on chains until they sat just a few feet above the tomatoes. I got a rotary fan that moved back and forth and put it on a timer, and the shoplights on a second timer. The shoplights were on about 15 to 18 hours a day and the fan ran for an hour, back and forth accross all the plants for an hour, twice a day. The fan was partly for pollination and partly to help try to keep my plants strong. Each tomato bucket sat in a water catching receptacle and I checked all my tomatoes every day and watered them by hand when appropriate. They were not overwatered and they were not allowed to dry out excessively. What were the results? First, there was more mess than I would have expected. Tomato plants shed leaves and things we often aren't aware of, and I'm sure this was aggravated by being indoors. Not a horrible mess, but not as clean as I thought it was going to be. Second, I got tomatoes from all of my plants, right through the winter, but most of the production was an initial burst from tomatoes that had been pollinated and started growing when outdoors. Those ones finished growing and, despite my efforts, the plants produced decreased flowers and decreased tomatoes after that. All of them kept growing a few tomatoes, but they were slow to grow and not very numerous. Third, and this really probably should not have been a surprise to me, the taste of the tomatoes was generally quite mediocre. Plants from varieties that were absolutely delicious in my garden were just somewhat better than store bought in my basement grown plants. THAT was the biggest failing from my experiment and was the main reason I never went to that much effort to try to grow them again. ALL of my tomato plants survived the winter, though some were a bit scraggly by the end. I took them out in late spring and planted them in the ground and continued to get tomatoes all summer long. Then I let them die in the winter and that was it. Altogether, I considered it to be a failed experiment because of the fairly 'average' taste. I'm sure they would have done better if they had been exposed to more natural light and more natural conditions. A large greenhouse would have been nice, but, though I have experimented with small greenhouses, I never had that much success with those, either. In the end, I just never felt it was worth repeating all the work. Hopefully others have had better experiences.

Dan, I've used a few different mixes in containers and I like the sound of your sea soil. The problem with containers is that the system is really too small to set up a true organic soil system in them. People do all sorts of things and may technically get away with it, but I my abilities can't do a completely organic soil and get reliable production, since any "help" and you kid yourself that it is "almost organic". That said, I had some luck with a mixture of 1/3 compost (Black Kow Composted Organic), 1/3 peat & 1/3 perlite in summer but you must watch it doesn't get waterlogged. I know it sounds strange, but raw perlite is "organic". You could put some of those fancy rock dusts in there and dolomitic lime and give it a whirl. Problem is at some point your plants will need the nutrient boost of something like Miracle Gro, which is not organic, but not as bad as some make it out to be, either! There are some Fox Farms hydroponic/organic and Dutch Master hydro organic ones, but these things are really cost intensive and there is no way I could afford to even evaluate them. Tomato-Tone is organic and you can use some of it (the affordable option I would use) but a lot of experimentation is necessary to get it right in a bucket. Those are the tools I would use. There are others that are more expert than I am in this forum on organic methods in a container, but the problem is that ingredients and climates can vary enough that a lot of experimentation is necessary anyway and it is a bit much to ask of a container considering the nutrient demands of a big tomato plant. And a bigger contaner ( say, 25 gallons) can be costly to fill with organic nutrients only. There are other much more economic ways to go if you drop the requirement of deriving all nutrition from "organic" sources, for example pine mulch, etc, is cheap but offers no nutrition so it doesn't get you anywhere nutrient wise, though it might help you save on perlite. I can't answer whether your tap is appropriate for your plant, even knowing the pH is 7.5. That's because it will be the interaction among the tap, soil ingredients and amendments that determine the pH of the container. For example, if your soil starts on the acid side which it likely will it needs to be neutralized with some lime, but you can do what I do ... put less in and water with alkaline water for a while. Clearly that is not an optimal situation but to be honest my plants do fine despite all the issues with pH, and my tap is pH 7.7. But this is a fragil relationship and the only way to now for sure is to pH test your soil while you grow toget the hang of what's happening, if you are really enthusiastic. Just because it works for me, btw, doesn't mean it will work for everyone. We get lots of rain here and that frequently washes trhough soil mixesand I purposely open the tops wide to encourage that. No residue builds up from the tap or any of my not-organic supplements due to the rain. The common wisdom of hydroponics of a vegetative and a reproductive period fertilization schemes doesn't seem very pronounced to me when growing the tomato for the long haul. To be perfectly honest, I think all these mantras about vegetative stages and drastic changes during flowering stages are geared towards high value crops LOL. Really with tomato plants you want to keep the nitrogen at a baseline, low in all of my scenarios. You are not growing vines, they get quickly unmanageable for indeterminates and make few tomatoes, and most everyone here seems to agree that being pretty stingy with nitrogen is the way to go. That's the opposite of what you've done. When I grow my tomatoes, my seedlings have only 1/2 to 2/3 the nitrogen the producing plants do, so my nitrogen rate actually increases for me. At the end I back off though because the plants get less productive and unmanageable so there's a lot of give and take. Hope that helps a little, because nothing is as easy as it seems, so most people find something that works and get pretty stuck to it. Cheers PC